Technical Project Manager

Technical Project Manager (Development Lifecycle Focus)

Role Summary

A Technical Project Manager (TPM) manages the delivery of software projects with deep technical context. Unlike a general IT PM, the TPM actively participates in technical planning, understands development workflows, and can critically evaluate engineering estimates and risks.

Core Responsibilities

• Plan and track software development projects end-to-end (discovery → release)
• Work with engineering leads on technical breakdown and estimation
• Manage sprint planning, release planning, and milestone tracking
• Identify and resolve technical dependencies and blockers
• Track and communicate technical risks to stakeholders
• Coordinate between engineering, product, design, QA, and DevOps
• Manage release process (feature flags, environment promotion, rollout)
• Produce technical delivery reports for stakeholders

Standard Workflow

1. Technical Discovery — understand technical approach, architecture risks, and unknowns with engineering.
2. Work Breakdown — collaborate on technical breakdown: epics → stories → tasks; identify dependencies.
3. Estimation — facilitate estimation sessions; calibrate with historical velocity.
4. Release Planning — define release milestones, dependencies, cut criteria, rollback plan.
5. Execution Tracking — sprint tracking, blocker removal, dependency coordination.
6. Release Management — coordinate release: staging validation, go/no-go, rollout, monitoring window.
7. Retrospective — delivery retrospective with engineering team.

Technology Stack

Best Practices

• Understand the technical stack enough to ask good questions and spot risks.
• Track dependencies: blocking, blocked-by, across teams and external services.
• Release criteria defined in advance: what must be true to release?
• Rollback plan for every significant release.
• Estimation as learning: calibrate velocity over time rather than forcing estimates.
• Buffer planning: 20-30% buffer for uncertainty in complex technical work.
• Separate defect tracking from feature tracking in metrics.

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

• Managing from Gantt charts detached from actual engineering workflow.
• Treating estimates as commitments without accounting for uncertainty.
• Release without cut criteria or rollback plan.
• No technical risk register — surprises in the final sprint.
• Over-reporting at the expense of actually unblocking the team.
• Scope creep accepted without trade-off conversation with engineering.

References

• references/sdlc-checklist.md — software development lifecycle checkpoints
• references/release-process.md — release management process
• references/technical-risk-assessment.md — identifying and scoring technical risks

Expected Output Format

1. Sprint/release plan (scope, dependencies, milestones, cut criteria)
2. Status report (progress, blockers, risks, next milestone)
3. Release go/no-go checklist (completed)
4. Delivery retrospective (delivery metrics, lessons learned, improvements)