About This Course

Is this course for me?

Thanks for considering taking Technical Program Management: A Practitioner's Guide! This course is for you if you want to:

1. Establish a better, more structured approach to improving your craft as a technical program manager.

2. Accelerate your career as a technical program manager.

3. Break into technical program management by successfully utilizing some of the best practices in your current job.

This course is broken down into bite-sized chunks. Treat it as a collection of related articles that build on one another. The purpose of breaking technical program management down like this is to help you fit learning into your busy schedule.

This course is only successful if it helps you grow and deliver better results in your current job. It doesn't matter if you're a current technical program manager or aspiring to be one. You can implement many of these practices immediately, no matter what your current role is.

What to expect

You should expect to gain a baseline understanding of the role through a series of helpful frameworks. This will be accomplished by reviewing the following:

• Effective program management techniques

• Baseline technical requirements of the role for the software industry

• Leadership behaviors needed in this role

• Career growth trends and advice

What not to expect

This course won't:

• Address every nuanced situation about the technical program management role. Many topics in this course could be expanded into their own specialized reviews. This course gives you a framework as a starting point to expand your talents as a technical program manager.

• Be applicable to every company. Many companies implement this role with slight variations, but this course will address the commonalities across many (if not all) of those companies

• Be a deep dive into system design and highly complex technical topics. Many other courses are dedicated to system design, distributed systems, and software architecture. We'll only cover what you should know at a high level.

• Be a replacement for actual on-the-job experience. This is meant to help you in your role.

• Cover any technical details of other areas of expertise, such as the hardware industry, energy industry, manufacturing industry, and so on.

How do I get the most from this course?

You'll improve your craft as a technical program manager by doing things rather than only reading about them.

Also, if you feel like a specific section doesn't go into enough detail, be proactive and do some independent research on it. If there is a huge gap, you can always provide feedback for future adjustments.

Lastly, the best way to learn is to teach. That sounds counterintuitive, but as you read concepts from this course, share small pieces with your coworkers. Doing this will help you solidify your understanding of the topics.