The Future Needs a New Kind of TPM

Hey friends 👋 — I’m Robert.

I’ve been in the tech industry for 25 years. Ten of those years I spent writing code as an engineer, and the last 15+ years I’ve been in leadership and now Technical Program Management at companies like Ancestry, Google, Amazon, Grammarly, and Meta. Along the way, I’ve helped launch large-scale AI driven products using NLP that are used by billions of users.

And here’s what I’ve realized: the role of the TPM is being rewritten in real time.

Why I’m Starting This

For most of my career, TPMs were the glue — keeping execution tight, risks tracked, and stakeholders aligned. But now, with AI touching everything from large language models, AI glasses, to spatial computing, TPMs have to evolve into something bigger: AI-native orchestrators.

We can’t just manage timelines anymore — we have to understand how every part of the AI lifecycle now impacts the way we build and ship products. The days of the traditional role of Engineer, Manager, Designer, Product Manager, and Technical Program Manager are over. With the advances in foundational AI models, including agentic and reasoning capabilities, we now have the opportunity be truly be a 100x multiplier.

A Hook: Your Own Personal AI TPM Chief of Staff

Here’s the question I want to open with:

👉 What if every senior leader — from VP of Engineering to Head of Product — could have their own personal AI-powered TPM Chief of Staff?

Think about it. A system that:

• Tracks programs across Jira, Sheets, Docs, Slack — automatically surfacing risks before they explode.
• Understands dependencies at the same level as a senior TPM, by reasoning across engineering roadmaps and research schedules.
• Synthesizes strategy — turning scattered updates into crisp narratives tailored for executives, teams, or customers.
• Continuously learns your org’s culture and priorities, becoming a second brain for execution.

We’re closer to this than people think. With agentic architectures, reasoning models, and multimodal LLMs, the building blocks are already here. What’s missing is the connective tissue — the TPM-like layer of orchestration that makes sense of complexity and drives action.

And here’s the kicker: if we don’t figure this out, AI will create even more organizational chaos than clarity. A personal AI TPM chief of staff isn’t a luxury — it might be the only way to keep pace with what’s coming.

What You’ll Find Here

This blog will explore exactly that intersection: TPM craft + AI innovation. Expect to see:

• Tactical playbooks for how TPMs can leverage AI tools today.
• Deep dives into topics like data annotation, model training cycles, and mixture-of-experts architectures — but always tied back to execution and leadership
• Stretch explorations — like AI TPM chiefs of staff, AR-native program dashboards, or LLM-driven strategy sprints.
• Field notes from 25 years in the trenches at Google, Amazon, and Meta, where I’ve seen both brilliant programs succeed and great ideas fail.

Why You Should Stick Around

If you’re a TPM, engineer, or leader who wants to understand how AI actually changes the way we build, this is for you. My goal is to make this space the playbook for the AI-era TPM: inspiring, technical, and brutally practical.

The future needs a new kind of TPM. And maybe, just maybe, your first AI chief of staff will be one.