Welcome to the month of November. I am excited to reboot my newsletter in a new monthly format. Of course this coincides with my new role in Walmart as Staff TPM at PeopleTech, which is exciting, so I will definitely look to add a hint of SRE and DevOps topics over the course of my newsletters.
DACI helps you “determine who is involved in which decisions, and in what way.” The framework categorizes roles to ensure everyone understands their level of involvement in the decision-making process
Let’s dive deep into a prominent PMI-PMP area of study, Organizational Structures. As a Technical Program Manager, being able to understand your organization’s structure helps you better align with the right leadership influencers, in turn to more effectively communicate, influence decision and execution, better conflict resolution, and more.
In the dynamic and fast-paced environment of Amazon, a Technical Program Manager (TPM) plays a critical role in driving the success of complex technical projects. The TPM’s ability to navigate the intricacies of program management while maintaining a clear technical vision is essential. Here are the top ten essential
Estimations are a cornerstone of Agile project management, offering teams a means to forecast effort, set expectations, and make informed decisions. However, the accuracy of these estimations can be significantly influenced by various cognitive biases. Understanding these biases and their impact is crucial for any team striving to improve their
What is Kubernetes? Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, is an open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and operation of containerized applications. Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes has since been donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. Why
Dependencies in software development is an inevitability, especially when it comes to complex projects involving multiple teams, components, or external vendors/systems. As a technical program manager, managing these interdependencies is what makes or breaks you, and leadership look to you to ensure a timely delivery and maintain agility. In
In my early days as a Technical Program Manager, I vividly remember a project where we proudly embraced Agile methodologies. We were a “raving” team, enthusiastic and committed to delivering high-quality software. However, as we progressed, it became evident that our enthusiasm alone wasn’t enough. Leadership were skeptical of
Over the past few years were have been witnessing the emergence of Development Operations (DevOps), a discipline emphasizing the execution, monitoring, and improving of software delivery, ideally through continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD), automated testing, and leveraging infrastructure as a code. Agile advocates principles and practices that are collaborative,
As an agile evangelist, ensuring my teams continuously improve is a pinnacle component of sprint planning and executing. I always insist on having one story dedicated process and operational improvement each sprint to ensure we constantly evaluate and improve our methods and practices to achieve better results and outcomes. There
Evidence-Based Management (EMB) “is an empirical approach that helps organizations to continuously improve customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results under conditions of uncertainty“, according to the EBM Guide, a framework for delivering value through strategic goals through intentional experimentation and evidence (measures) in order to improve organizational performance over
It’s no secret I always love to squeeze a rugby analogy into my day to day tech world, not just because I unbiasedly think rugby to be the best sport in the world, but because I feel it has a lot of relevances in today’s agile world. Why’
Agile
There is this preconceived notion that authoring user stories is confined to the requirements gathering phase. In fact, user stories post a critical role in communication between stakeholders and development teams throughout the development lifecycle. I will explain in this article how you employ user stories as the vehicle of
Agile
As a scrum advocate, you embrace the agile framework of collaboration, communication, and feedback among team members. However, experience has taught the seasoned observers that not all team members may feel comfortable or motivated to participate in Scrum events, such as Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective.
DevOps
In a modern and evolved organization you would ideally find teams leveraging Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. CICD enabled faster and more reliable delivery of software to customers by automating the build, test, and deployment processes. Ideally allowing your customers to receive releases in a predictive manner,
Agile
As we look to employ our scrum framework to more complex and larger projects, we need to adapt our approach to ensure we meet the emerging scaling challenges. As a Technical Program Manager, it is prudent you understand many of the common scaling scrum frameworks available, Nexus, LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum)
Agile
Good developers realize the strength and resilience of well-decoupled, clearly- written code components, powered by a strong development framework in building successful software. It is no different for product owners authoring effective user stories that are clearly articulated and actionable. In this article, we will explore a framework called INVEST
Program Management
In the realm of effective program management, self-awareness stands as a crucial attribute that can transform average managers into exceptional leaders. Self-awareness encompasses a deep understanding of one’s strengths, weaknesses, emotions, and the impact they have on others. This powerful quality empowers managers to make better decisions, build stronger
System Design
Git Merge Git Merge is a straightforward method for integrating changes from one branch into another. When you merge a branch, Git creates a new commit that combines the changes from both the source and target branches. This new commit represents the merge point and has multiple parent commits. Merging
System Design
Swift Package Manager (SPM) is a powerful tool provided by Apple for managing dependencies in Swift projects. It simplifies the process of integrating third-party libraries and frameworks into your projects, ensuring a smooth development experience. Prior to SPM, I had used cocoapodswhich is still indeed an active project, but with
Product Management
What are Stakeholder Personas? Stakeholder personas are fictional, yet representative, profiles that depict different types of stakeholders involved in a project. These personas are created by analyzing and synthesizing information about the various individuals or groups who have a stake in the project’s outcomes. Personas help organizations gain deeper
System Design
Optionals are a fundamental concept in Swift programming that allow developers to handle situations where a value might be missing. Swift’s optional type system provides a powerful mechanism to express the absence of a value and helps prevent runtime crashes caused by accessing nil values. In this article, we
GenAI
With the story of the year being ChatGPT, squarely focused on everyone from engineers to data scientists, writers, academics, I thought I’d write a blurb on how as a Technical Program Manager, I leverage ChatGPT in my day-to-day. I assume of course unless you have been living under a
Agile
In project management, a Parking Lot is a designated space, either physical or virtual, where ideas, concerns, questions, or issues that arise during project meetings or discussions are recorded. These unresolved matters are “parked” in the lot to be revisited and addressed later, preventing them from derailing the current discussion
