What makes a good Program Manager?

People often ask me what makes a good program manager?

I wanted to share how I think of the program management discipline.
In my 10 + years of experience, I have worked with multiple organizations in different domains. The word program management means other things to different people and various companies. It means different things. Sometimes it is used synonymously with project management, and sometimes with product management, it’s a mishmash.

Program management is a multifaceted discipline; it requires you to build various muscles to manage what, why, and how.

A program manager needs to build strengths in product management design and architecture, project management, and leadership.

As a program manager at different levels of an organization, you will get to exercise each of these muscles to different extents, always to a time that’s greater than zero.

Product management helps you decide what needs to be built and why. The technical architecture and design enable you to understand how this should be made. What technology should be brought to bear?

Project management helps you manage the building process to ensure that what you started building can be delivered.

Finally, leadership is the dark matter that allows you to rally others towards the cause.

As a product manager, you need to be customer-obsessed, customer obsession means understanding what your customer needs, who is your customer, using customer input to be the validator, and the north star, have the entrepreneurial spirit to find innovative ways of solving customer problems, staying abreast of development in the industry, knowing newer technology, what the competition is doing and so on.

What innovations are happening? Ability to set a clear vision and strategy and build out a road map that rallies people around your world but gives them a clear view of where you are going in both the short term midterm and the long term.

Be hardcore about understanding the ROI, be realistic and assumptions behind any ROI calculation and understand the sensitivity of assumptions in the ROI. It would be best if you had a passion for quality; think of how hard it tests to get customer attention; once you have their attention, you want to walk them with the quality of what you have built.

Most fantastic ideas do not mean anything if you cannot break them to market.

This is where how becomes critical. Having the right technical design in architecture for the product you’re building. As a program manager, you need to be well versed in system design and architecture; you need to translate your vision into a specification that an engineer can understand and implement.

It would be best if you had strong enough engineering fundamentals to work with engineers to ensure implementation by accomplishing what you envisioned for the short term and the mid and long-term vision you have outlined.

As the face of implementation gets going, you have to make it happen; you have to wear the product manager’s hat. Keeping to the schedule resource and scope constraints in mind, handling risk as they evolve, managing the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns as you uncover and the team uncovers them. Keep the team in the stakeholders engaged, involved, and informed. Make progress in all the ambiguity and not get bogged down by ambiguous environments. Handle conflicting priorities and make appropriate trade-offs.

To make everything happen, a key attribute is a leadership;

this is what I call the dark matter that helps you seamlessly practice the first three areas and very effectively.

You will be asked to make decisions and help make trade-offs, and you will have to do that with incomplete information in all of the ambiguity surrounding you. Managing multiple parties you do not have direct authority over and having them engaged in all trade-off discussions throughout the project.

All this becomes easier when you become data-driven. So the data-driven takes the passion and the emotion out of decision making and helps crowned decisions to the matrix that you had set out to measure the team, the product, and the project.

You play all of these roles in parallel and continue wearing multiple hats.

Having the edge delete a chuckle of various paths simultaneously will come in very handy as you work to excel in becoming a good program manager.

I would love to hear your opinion; join me in conversation in the comments feeds below.