GHC 19 — Becoming a Program Manager: How do I Know if it is For Me?

This is session notes for a GHC19 Session — “Becoming a Program Manager: How do I Know if it is For Me?” held on 3rd October, 2019.

Speakers:

Stephanie Boudreau is a Senior Program Manager at Google. She got her BS in Psychology and criminology, has 9 years of Program Management experience at Google and 15 years of experience in the field in total. After her degree, she began counseling at school, then volunteered and went on to become a Program Manager at a non profit, before moving on to Google.

Sapna Vasudeo is a Senior Technical Program Manager at Google. She has 5 years of Program Management experience at Google and 10 years in total. After being inspired by a book on management, she decided to pursue her Masters in Engineering Management.

The session was accompanied with fun slides that made it easy to connect to the content.

Program vs Product vs Project Management

Program Manager: Driving a portfolio based on company goals.

Project Manager: Single Project execution

Product Manager: Strategy (the what and the why )

Why are program managers needed?

1. Strategic Alignment
2. Risk Management
3. Maximize Resources and Optimizes
4. Launching/Landing Programs
5. Managing Quality
6. Bring Leadership and Direction
7. Clear Focus and Objectives
8. Connecting the pieces of the puzzle.
9. Predictability

Sapna used an analogy of a group of people going to Disney World to explain this concept. Program Managers take care of how many people are going, where they are going to meet, how they are going, they figure out the weather, traffic and other dependencies. The engineering team are like the cars and drivers in this scenario, who devise a way for people to get to a location.

What makes a good Program Manager?

Good Program Managers bring teams together, collaborate, and are very involved. They understand the product or feature very well. They have a holistic view, do risk mitigation and have a contingency plan. They track milestones and figure out in advance if a deadline can’t be met. They build trust within teams. Stephanie used the analogy of a conductor in an orchestra. A Program Manager in this case manages a cross functional team to build an awesome feature, or in this case make a beautiful song.

A Day in the life of a Program Manager

Although no two days are exactly the same, Stephanie gave us an overview of what a typical day looks like. It involves multi-tasking, building relationships and communicating with people so everyone is aligned. They often need to tradeoff between what is urgent and what is important. And of course, it involves a lot of emails.

Highlights

Stephanie said that the best part is when the product launches. She says it so exciting that it makes her feel like a conductor, who bought it all together. She also says it feels great when you get to unblock people. It involves navigating through different pieces like a puzzle. Building relationships was another favorite part of Stephanie and Sapna’s work life.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges Sapna mentioned was unrealistic timelines. There are a lot of things to do and they need to be done very quickly. It is challenging to not compromise on quality and that you would need to learn to say NO and help mitigate risks. It is also important to make sure you prioritize among tasks that keep coming up in between normally scheduled tasks. Sapna also says humans are optimistic when it comes to timelines, and she has to make sure this does not interfere with existing timelines. There are also a lot of meetings that you need to navigate through.

Optimizing, Being Ruthless and Prioritizing seemed like the most important work a Program Manager does.

How do I crack the interview?

Books and sites are a good place to start, but most Program Management interviews are situational. One way to prepare is to talk to an engineering manager or technical lead to see if there is a gap and take the opportunity to fix it. Another way is to go to a program manager in your team and offer to help.

Another suggestion was to look at your personal life, or to volunteer at non profits and consider situations where you run into issues and you put tasks (or projects) back on track. Seeking a mentor or coach and having monthly one on ones can also help you get first hand experience.

Questions

Q1. How do you communicate timelines?

Building trust, and getting a two way communication channel open is the best way. Finding a friend on the team that you can go and chat with regarding the status is also a great way.

Q2. What tools do you find valuable?

At Google the speakers used spreadsheets, internal bug trackers and dashboards. But they mentioned that some others love Gant charts. Depending on the audience you are dealing with, choosing different tools that are easy for the rest of the team to use is important. MS Project and Google Docs were also some favorites of the speakers.

I felt it was a very informative session that gave me an insight into the life of a Program Manager.