Mastering Time Management for Technical Program Managers and TPM Leaders
- Priyanka Shinde
- Mar 21
- 9 min read
Imagine this scenario—you’re in back-to-back meetings all day, juggling expectations across multiple teams and stakeholders. The clock hits 5 PM, but your real work has just begun. You’re responding to emails, updating roadmaps, analyzing risks, and firefighting last-minute issues late into the evening. Your to-do list only seems to grow, and no matter how hard you push, there’s never enough time to step back and focus on the bigger picture. Sound familiar?
You’re not alone. Priyanka Shinde, a Silicon Valley tech leader, experienced the same when leading a large TPM organization at a fast-growing startup. Like many Technical Program Managers (TPMs) and TPM Leaders, she found herself caught in a constant whirlwind of tasks—managing tight deadlines, aligning cross-functional teams, handling escalations, and somehow trying to find time for strategic thinking. The sheer volume of responsibilities left little room for reflection or deeper problem-solving, the very things that make TPMs truly effective.
If this relentless cycle of "doing" resonates with you, it’s time to take a step back and regain control of your time. Let's understand the root cause, and identify practical strategies to rebalance priorities, and actionable steps to master time management. You don’t have to stay stuck in the grind.
Understanding the Problem
When you’re a TPM or TPM Leader, you wear many hats. You're the bridge between teams, the risk mitigator, the roadmap keeper, and the decision enabler. Your work doesn’t happen in isolation; it’s fully dependent on coordination and communication, which often makes your day feel like a whirlwind.
As a TPM, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overcommitting or juggling too much. This can happen for several reasons:
Transitioning from IC to Manager: Moving from an individual contributor role to a managerial position is a common turning point. The skills that made you successful as an IC—getting into the details, solving problems hands-on—may no longer serve you well as your responsibilities evolve to focus on delegation, strategy, and enabling others.
Small Teams Wearing Many Hats: In a startup or smaller team, you may be managing multiple roles simultaneously, including program management, product strategy, and even technical tasks. This lack of role boundaries can make it difficult to prioritize effectively.
Impact of Layoffs and Reorgs: Organizational changes such as layoffs or reorgs can lead to increased workloads and blurred lines of accountability. Suddenly, TPMs are left picking up the slack or managing areas outside of their original scope.
Large, Complex Programs: When managing large programs, TPMs often feel the weight of multiple stakeholders, shifting priorities, and dependencies across teams. Without clear alignment, it’s easy to get bogged down in firefighting instead of strategic execution.
Why is Time Management Hard for TPMs?
Competing Priorities: As a technical leader, you’re constantly managing conflicting needs from engineering teams, product managers, and executives. Each group has its own goals and timelines, and it’s your job to align them. Balancing technical feasibility with business objectives is challenging, especially with limited resources or tight deadlines. This often requires tough decisions and careful diplomacy.
Constant Context Switching: Your day involves shifting between detailed technical discussions, like debugging or reviewing architecture, and strategic conversations about roadmaps or budgets. This back-and-forth is mentally draining, as it demands both technical depth and strategic insight in quick succession.
Reactive Workload: Unplanned issues like system failures, bugs, or stakeholder escalations can take over your day, leaving little time for proactive planning. It’s easy to get stuck in firefighting mode, where you’re constantly responding to crises instead of focusing on long-term improvements. This can also demoralize teams, as it distracts from meaningful, planned work.
Lack of Boundaries: Without clear boundaries, your role can expand endlessly. You might end up taking on tasks outside your core responsibilities, from mediating disputes to handling admin work. Over time, this can lead to burnout as you try to meet everyone’s expectations. Setting boundaries is critical but can feel impossible in a high-pressure environment.
Communication Overload: Emails, Slack messages, meetings, and updates can feel like a full-time job. Miscommunication or unclear instructions can cause delays and conflict. Balancing accessibility with protecting your focus time is a constant challenge.
Pressure to Deliver Results: Stakeholders often expect quick wins and tangible outcomes. This pressure can lead to rushed decisions, technical debt, or prioritizing short-term fixes over sustainable solutions. Balancing progress with quality is a tough but crucial part of the job.
Team Morale and Motivation: You’re responsible for keeping your team productive and engaged. This includes resolving conflicts, addressing skill gaps, and ensuring your team feels supported. When morale dips, it not only hurts productivity but also adds to your workload as you work to rebuild trust.
Staying Current in Technology: As a technical leader, you’re expected to stay updated on trends, tools, and methods while managing day-to-day responsibilities. Finding time for continuous learning can feel overwhelming, but falling behind can undermine your credibility.
Being a technical leader is a rewarding but highly demanding role. Recognizing and addressing these challenges can help you navigate the complexities of leadership while maintaining your health, team morale, and long-term success.
Tactical vs Strategic: Two Different Execution Modes
One of the biggest challenges for TPMs is balancing the “execution” mode versus the “strategic” mode.
Tactical Mode: In this mode, you’re hands-on—solving problems, writing documentation, aligning schedules, or even jumping into technical discussions. This is often where TPMs start their careers, and it feels rewarding because you’re directly contributing. But staying in “tactical execution mode” too long can lead to micromanagement and prevent team members from growing.
Strategic Mode: This mode is focused on enabling others to succeed. Here, you’re delegating tasks, facilitating communication, and ensuring the team has what they need to be productive. It’s also about focusing on strategy—prioritizing initiatives, identifying risks, and driving alignment across teams and stakeholders. Effective leaders know when to step back and trust their team while maintaining visibility into progress.
The trap lies in not transitioning effectively between these modes. Many TPMs feel the need to stay in “execution mode” because they’re comfortable with it, or because their team is understaffed. Over time, this can lead to inefficiency and burnout. Developing the ability to shift between these two modes is critical to not only managing your time but also empowering your team and driving long-term success.
A Day in the Life of a TPM or TPM Leader
To help contextualize the challenge, here’s a detailed look at how a typical TPM’s day can be split between two key modes: Tactical Mode and Strategic Mode.
Tactical Mode
This is the hands-on work that focuses on executing tasks and ensuring projects stay on track. A TPM in Tactical Mode might:
Attend morning stand-ups with engineering teams, ensuring everyone is aligned and on task.
Collaborate with product managers to align on priorities and clarify requirements, ensuring that technical execution meets business needs.
Review project risks and mitigation strategies, updating stakeholders on changes to timelines or deliverables.
Participate in sprint planning sessions with the development team, helping to break down work into smaller, manageable tasks.
Dive into technical challenges or roadblocks, troubleshooting and brainstorming solutions alongside the engineering team.
Tactical Mode is where the TPM gets into the details, solves problems, and keeps day-to-day work moving forward.
Strategic Mode
Strategic Mode focuses on high-level coordination, communication, and long-term planning. A TPM in Strategic Mode might:
Handle unexpected escalations, prioritizing urgent issues and ensuring the right resources are allocated to resolve them.
Craft presentations and communicate status updates for leadership, providing clear insights into the progress of programs and key initiatives.
Engage in cross-functional meetings, ensuring alignment across teams like product, engineering, design, and even marketing.
Strategically plan and prioritize workloads, identifying long-term risks and opportunities for improvement.
Send late-night emails or join calls to coordinate with global teams across different time zones, ensuring seamless collaboration.
Strategic Mode allows the TPM to step back, oversee the bigger picture, and ensure the team’s efforts align with organizational goals.
It’s no wonder strategic thinking often falls to the wayside when TPMs have to juggle both Tactical and Strategic Modes so frequently throughout their day. Balancing these responsibilities is key to thriving in this challenging but rewarding role.
Finding the Balance
The key to thriving as a TPM or TPM Leader is balancing the immediate demands of the day with the long-term value you bring to the organization. To start, you’ll need to step back, reflect, and audit how you currently spend your time.
Start with a Time Audit
Set aside a day or a week to log how you spend your time. Use categories like meetings, reactive tasks, proactive planning, and deep work. This exercise will uncover where your time is going and what needs to change.
Prioritize with Urgent vs. Important
Effective prioritization can make or break productivity. Borrowing from the Eisenhower Matrix, you can break tasks into four categories based on their urgency and importance, ensuring you focus on what truly matters. Here's a deeper dive into each quadrant and actionable tips to help you manage your time better:
Urgent & Important (Do Immediately): These are your top priorities—the tasks that demand immediate attention and have significant consequences if not addressed. Examples include resolving critical blockers, handling crises, meeting tight deadlines, or making key decisions.
Not Urgent but Important (Schedule): Tasks in this category are essential but don’t require immediate action. They often involve long-term planning, strategy development, skill-building, or relationship management. While they don't scream for attention, neglecting them can cause problems down the line.
Urgent but Not Important (Delegate): These tasks need to be done soon but don’t necessarily require your personal involvement. Examples include routine requests, non-critical meetings, or tasks better suited for someone else on your team.
Not Urgent & Not Important (Eliminate): These are the distractions or time-wasters that add little to no value, such as excessive social media scrolling, aimless meetings, or activities that don’t align with your goals. Eliminating these tasks frees up time for what truly matters.
Tips for Implementing Your Time Management Plan
Create a plan for your important" work Important tasks require dedicated time and focus. To carve out this time, you’ll need practical strategies to put your plan into action.
Block Time on Your Calendar
Proactively block time for your most important work. Schedule chunks of focus time into your calendar for activities like problem-solving, strategic thinking, and stakeholder communication. Make these blocks non-negotiable—treat them like meetings.
Learn to Say No
Saying “no” can be difficult, but it’s crucial to maintaining a manageable workload. If a task or meeting doesn’t align with your priorities, politely decline or delegate it.
Ask Questions to Determine Real Urgency
Not everything labeled "urgent" actually is. When faced with a fire drill, ask clarifying questions to determine the real urgency and whether it can wait or be handled differently.
Bio-hack Your Productivity
Science-backed productivity hacks can make a significant difference. For example:
The Pomodoro Technique ensures you focus in short, intense bursts while taking regular breaks.
Peak Performance Hours leverage your natural energy levels by saving high-priority tasks for when you’re most alert.
3Ds - Defer, Delegate, Delete
Streamline your routine using these four strategies:
Defer tasks that can be scheduled for later without immediate impact.
Delegate responsibilities that others can handle.
Delete tasks that no longer align with your goals.
Set Aside Time for Reflection
Daily Reflection (15 minutes): Review what you accomplished and adjust your priorities for the following day.
Weekly Reflection (30 minutes): Assess your progress on larger goals, identify process improvements, and update your time management plan.
Automate with AI
Automate recurring tasks with tools like Jira, Trello, or Slack reminders. Leverage AI tools to save time and boost productivity, such as using AI-driven schedulers, email assistants, or data analysis tools to handle repetitive or time-intensive tasks.
Iterate
Time management is never “set it and forget it.” Periodically reevaluate what’s working and what’s not, adjusting your approach as needed.
Building Long-Term Strategic Thinking
Time management for TPMs and TPM Leaders isn’t just about getting through the day—it’s about creating space for strategic thinking. When you free up time from reactive tasks, you can focus on initiatives that drive long-term value, like guiding cross-functional teams, refining program strategies, and delivering scalable solutions.
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Time management for TPMs isn’t easy, but it’s essential. By auditing your time, prioritizing what matters, and implementing actionable strategies, you’ll equip yourself to lead more effectively, think strategically, and avoid burnout.
Looking to take your skills to the next level?
Check out the best-selling book – The Art of Strategic Execution, an essential resource for TPMs and program leaders striving to align their work with big-picture goals
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why is time management important for TPMs and program leaders?
Time management is critical for TPMs and program leaders because it directly impacts your ability to think strategically, prioritize effectively, and deliver scalable solutions. By managing your time wisely, you reduce the risk of burnout, ensure alignment with organizational goals, and maintain focus on driving long-term value while guiding cross-functional teams.
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