What a Technical Program Manager actually does

There is a particular moment when I meet someone new and they ask what I do for a living.“I’m a Technical Program Manager.”You can usually see the follow-up question forming before I’ve finished the sentence.“Cool. What is a Technical Program Manager?”If I explain it using words like alignment, execution, stakeholders and cross-functional delivery, their eyes just glaze over. If I say I work with engineers but I’m not an engineer - and that I work on delivery but I’m not quite a producer or project manager - I haven’t exactly cleared things up. Sometimes, I might just say "it's like a technical project manager" and leave it there - but that doesn't feel quite right either.The difficulty is that Technical Program Manager (TPM) work often sits in the gaps between well-understood jobs. Those gaps are also where some of the most expensive problems begin.First, what a TPM is notA TPM is not simply a scrum master, a project tracker with a fancier title, or the person responsible for making…