Wikimedia Product/Technical Program Management/Day to day

From mediawiki.org

What kinds of things the Technical Program Managers do on a regular basis:

Daily[edit]

  • Facilitate standups, surface cross-team/departmental issues
  • Facilitate meetings
  • Follow up (via email, chat, etc) on action items

Weekly[edit]

  • Do board grooming/refinement
  • Facilitate retros (some are every 2 weeks, some are monthly)
  • Prioritize and centralize requests from PMs
  • 1:1 check-ins with PMs for planning, task management, etc
  • If needed, raise concerns with Tech PgM team manager
  • Coordinate with Engineering Managers and PMs (Designers at times as well) to balance workload
  • Facilitate triage of unplanned work

Monthly[edit]

  • Coordinate ordering and/or distributing testing devices
  • Ensure that PMs update project pages

Quarterly[edit]

  • Check on status of quarterly goals
  • Manage dependencies with other teams
  • Develop and maintain team timeline

At some point during the year[edit]

  • Organize and facilitate offsites
    • Send relevant feedback and suggest process changes based on results
  • Create artifacts to document and socialize team process/ceremonies
  • Partner with team to constantly refine team ceremonies  
  • Follow up on process changes as needed (change management)
  • Document and escalate risks/mitigation strategies
  • Develop scoping document and timeline for ad hoc projects
  • Escalate blockers and challenging issues to Grace
  • Maintain, and when needed, create new Phabricator projects (e.g. #OWC2020)
  • Integrate new team members into team processes and artifacts
  • Create transition plans when new projects are started, etc.