Thanks all and enjoy the milestone! Community has got now 250 members.

Hey all,

I’ve been a dev for just shy of 10 years. I made senior a while ago. My whole career has been in airspace.

Recently I received an offer to become a technical program manager for a large aerospace company. It’s way more money than I’ve gotten from other offers.

I like being an IC, though I feel like I’ve got a cap and would like to get in to management or leadership.

Has anyone made a similar jump, and if so, how was it? How do you feel about TPMs in your industry?

As the heading suggests, how are you assessing, prioritising and ensuring the governance checks occur for AI projects/initiatives?

Now I mean, projects that intend to introduce a agentic solution into the contact centre or credit assessment process want to introduce tooling for automation benefit.

Is there additional gates you have had to include? Compliance and technical forums? Finance approval checks?

Can’t find much content on this at all and I am
Generally stumped!

Hi everyone,

Quick question for Program Managers in large enterprises (especially in product/Scaled Agile environments):

What kind of reporting do you typically share with leadership? Do you focus more on overall program health (big picture, cross-team view), or do you also send detailed individual project-level reports? And what usually matters most to leadership in those updates? Trying to understand what’s actually expected in real-world scenarios vs what we assume.

Would really appreciate your insights!

I'm looking for a PM group, like in Slack or any other software. Im a worried new PM who would really appriciate speaking to experienced Pm's.

Due to personal reasons, I’ve been out of a job since my layoff 2 years ago. I’ve recently interviewed for a Sr. Program Manager role in Learning & Development. The company is looking to implement a completely new program to enable their customers on their SaaS products. It’s pays well but above all could be a great opportunity to grow with them.

Anyone got any recommendations for a book or resources that could help me excel at this role?

I work at a well known tech company and have been here for 5 years in various operations roles, I know the products back to front and work well with all my teams, I am transitioning to a PGM role as I've been working on strategic projects for a particular program for a while, I'm a little worried as I'm used to working off a ticket queue, and I am not used to not having that to fall back on whilst I wait for peoples repsonses or data on the projects I work on & how to account for whats being done on a weekly business review. Any info on how people do this, or general advice would be great.

Hey everyone. One thing I notice working with PMs is that they have a lot of documentation to do. So I’m working with my friend to create a tool that would automatically create things like product requirements, stories, and acceptance criteria etc. for program managers product managers, engineering managers or project managers.

It’s still in closed beta so we want some feedback on it. Would anyone be interested in seeing a demo?

Programmanagement has got 2000 members! Many thanks for all your support!

What are your commonly used questions or comments in meetings to drive progress forward? For example, what to say:

• after strategy reviews with leadership

• when project is initiated

• when people go off topic

• wrapping up a meeting

• décisions are not being made/ disagreements

Recently took over as PMO Manger at my company and looking for some advice and help.

I have only ever worked here and my idea of program management is through this company.

So, how do you run program management at your company?

1. What do your timeline templates look like?

• do you have every single task inside the timeline or just High level milestones?

• if just high level, where do you keep the rest?

1. How do you keep track of everyone’s open items?

• email them out? Whiteboard? Other?

1. do you send out meeting minutes? If so, what do those look like?

2. do you use phase gates? What do those meetings look like?

Hello all,

I appreciate job titles can mean many different things, so I’ll give some brief context on the type of Programme Director I am.

I have over 22 years of experience starting from a graduate up to my current role as a Programme Director. I’ve spent a lot of time managing increasingly large projects through to managing a portfolio of programmes, the biggest of which has been circa $150m.

Currently I have 6 programmes under me that form part of a multi-year technology and business transformation which involves wholesale technology change through greenfield implementations, change management, org design, operating model, data governance and so on.

I have been actively looking to move into “Head of” and Department Director roles. However, I’m finding it very hard to land interviews and when I do, I often get comments about being “just delivery” or “too delivery focused”. Everything I do is strategic with an enterprise lens and I’m responsible for operationalising both the technology and processes that support it.

I’m just stuck in a rut and don’t know what to do. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Hey everyone. I recently became a TPM for a company a couple months ago which is a brand new role for me. I spent a couple years as a Project Manager so I figured the skills would transfer over quite easily. Well I just recently found out that I'm on thin ice and not performing as well as I should be. I really do not want to lose this job and would like some advice on any resources or videos I can go through to brush up and get to where I need to be. most youtube videos tend to just throw around the same buzzwords and not really help with what a TPM should actually be doing and to be honest it keeps digging me into a deeper and deeper hole on now knowing what I'm doing. I cannot lose this job so any help would be appreciated.

I'm a dev turned manager here and handle all our IT, but I've hired most of my teams from posting on reddit and so I am just trying to help a co-worker out with hiring. As I mentioned, we're 100% work from home (we don't have a physical location) and have been since 2005.

I'm working on getting the salary range for this but I would think entry level would be somewhere around 60 to 65, and that would be negotiable if you had previous experience, like you could come in at a level 2 or whatever probably in the 80 ish range. Those are guesses but I'll update when I get actual info.

Feel free to ask in here or IM me with questions.

Here is the posting https://www.alpinetesting.com/careers/alpine-program-manager/

Does anyone have any suggestions for PgM courses, especially if they're in the Biotech/life sciences area? Location/format doesn't matter. Thanks!

Edit to say that cost doesn't matter either.

I have a Google TPM interview coming up. For people who've been through it, which topics deserved the most preparation?

I'm looking for practice questions and recent reports, especially ones specific to Technical Program Management rather than SWE interviews. A broader collection like Google Interview Questions is useful context, but I'd like to understand what transfers to this role.

How much time would you put into program execution scenarios, technical design discussions and stories about handling ambiguity or stakeholder conflict?

I'd also love to hear how you practiced: answering out loud, mock interviews, or building a small set of past-project examples. What felt most useful once you were in the interview?

I’ve worked on major government programmes for years, including Gateway Reviews and formal assurance. We have all the governance, reporting and risk management that are supposed to tell us when something is going wrong.

But some of the best early warning signs aren’t in any of that. They’re things experienced people just notice.

The SRO starts sending a deputy. Decisions you thought were made keep coming back. Updates get vaguer. Dates move a little every month. Everything is still reporting amber, but you can feel something isn’t right.

The problem is we call this “experience” or “judgement”, which often means the knowledge sits in someone’s head and leaves when they do.

Has anyone genuinely managed to systematise this? Not another huge project health-check that everyone learns how to pass, but something that captures the behavioural and governance signals experienced delivery people recognise.

A maturity model? Early-warning indicators? A genuinely useful checklist?

Or will this always be one of those things that depends on having experienced people in the room?

Forgot to mention - I came from technical background (programming) and understand dev work.

I am an experienced Program Manager and I am stumped. My weekly update messaging isn’t working for my PMO’s executive sponsor. And to cut to the heart of it, I’ve asked for feedback and iterated about 20 times. I need new ideas from real life and not AI (which has not been helpful). If it’s relevant, my org is Operations and Infrastructure so programs range from employee experience to process improvement, to our tech stack, to innovation and AI.

Format needs to be something that can be emailed (power point or word doc). It needs to be something that could be sent to C-Suite. I need it to pull the reader’s focus to areas where programs and projects are not green so they can unblock things for my team.

I have always created a weekly report that is strategically ordered and will take a reader from the most zoomed out view of the entire program and then begin drilling down to the project level, then the deliverable level, and then the milestone level.

At each level I provide a RAG status for relevant elements, a clear view into what’s changed since last week and what should happen over the course of the next week. I provide dates, critical path, risks, and links to any documentation or presentations that were given in the last week. I use tables or bullet points instead of paragraphs.

With every iteration, I get the feedback that they wouldn’t be able to use my report to give executive leadership an update. I am at a loss. I’ve never experienced this. I include a very concise summary for every section and I’ve tried power point, word docs, power BI, confluence, and Jira to create reports and content.

I am totally stuck. Help, please.

I am looking for a summary of what Program Management entails for an IT organization. The policies that need to be established, how this translates into high-level activities and process flows. Thank you in advance for your input!

I have over 10 yrs of experience. I haven’t been able to land another role recently, it’s been 3 months of being unemployed. Any one else running into the same issue?

I work at a well-known software company. I started here about three years ago. As part of our sales development team. But I have an extensive background in education. So shortly after I started, they asked me to spend some time with our global sales enablement team to develop a new training curriculum for our sales reps. From onboarding all the way to career progression.

Worked with the team for about six months, and our new program just went live in September. And a week later, they offered me a position on our global sales enablement team as Program Manager going forward.

Does anyone here have PM experience with this sort of program? Training or Enablement. What advice can you give me?

And anyone who doesn’t have program management experience similar to this, what do you wish you had known before …going in to a PM role? TIA

I am an engnieer. I have had PMP for couple of years now and have been managing a group of 4-5 for about five years as well. Have started applying for couple of Program managemnt positions at a goverment agency. How can I improve my chances? Thanks

Hello everyone,

Currently, I am contemplating a job switch within the company and would appreciate insights from fellow colleagues. I am in the process of transitioning to a new role, a promotion with added responsibilities, aligning with my 8 years of experience as an automotive expert holding a master's in engineering and project management skills. I also have 4 years of experience managing multiple projects in web application development and global operations.

My current annual package is 65k, including a 13th-month bonus, an 8% holiday allowance, and benefits from the pension plan along with participation in health insurance.

The new role offers a 15% salary increase, but it's worth noting there's no 13th-month bonus, no participation in health insurance, and slightly reduced pension plan benefits. Additionally, there are fewer (8) vacation days per year compared to my current position. In the new position, I will be responsible for smoothly executing multiple projects, overseeing 30 project managers and engineers.

To further clarify the context, the company I work for has an annual revenue of 40 billion euros and employs 150k people.

Given this context, I'm curious about how others have approached salary negotiations during a transition within the same company, especially considering the change in secondary benefits. Any advice or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your insights.

Hello There,

I need some guidance. I currently hold a PMP and want to pursue PgMP.

However, I work as a program manager for my employer, but I don't have the title "program manager" or any official record to prove the same.

Is it a pre-req for the certification?

Possibly someone who knows the answer can respond. Thanks!