Exploring Functional Competencies

Author’s experience: I’ve worked for most of my time as a TPM at the same company—as such, I was concerned about an unconscious bias of what a TPM is or should be. To combat this, I sought outside perspectives from as many high-profile companies as I could—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple. To help confirm the interviews I had, and to fill in gaps where interviews weren’t possible, I combed through the job boards of these companies to see what each was looking for in a TPM.

Insights into the TPM role from interviews

One thing that this matrix doesn’t cover extensively is style, which we were able to learn more about from the interviews we conducted. So, let’s talk a little about the things that stood out here.

Of the companies we conducted interviews at, Meta (formerly called Facebook) was the youngest, having formed in the mid-2000s. Due to this, their standards for project management are, as the interviewer put it, based on a “do what is needed” mentality. This is by no means bad, as many companies use this strategy to great success. There wasn’t much from the job boards that clues us in on this, but the focus on the SDLC does seem to agree with the bottom-up approach to management that the interviewee referenced, where the drive is from the engineering teams.

At the other end of the tenure spectrum is Microsoft. Some people may think about Microsoft’s own Project software and assume Microsoft is a highly regimented, PMP-style organization. As it turns out, this isn’t true! Though we are sure some people use Microsoft Project there, it isn’t standardized. The interviewee we talked to said many of the individuals ...