Infrastructure Technical Program Management Team

Vision

Enable the delivery of quality products and Programs on time by driving team alignment, accountability, accelerating execution, and providing unbiased guidance.

Mission

• Drive cross-functional directions and strategies.
• Identify risks, opportunities and dependencies in the engineering initiatives and organizations.
• Work cross-functionally to build solutions.
• Enable teams to make decisions via objective and sustainable frameworks.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Technical Program Managers are end-to-end problem solvers.
• Infrastructure Technical Program Managers are product managers for Infrastructure internal products/platforms, in the absence of dedicated product managers. For example, GDK, Triage Ops, Dependency Management.
• Infrastructure Technical Program Managers are enablers for engineers.

What do we do?

• Develop viable plans for complex programs and align stakeholders.
• Orchestrate the execution of projects across cross-functional teams by managing dependencies and collaboration across projects/teams and creating a framework for teams to work together.
• Plan and implement communication plans to provide unbiased regular program updates to all stakeholders, surface risks, and drive course correction.
• Align priorities and timelines for ownership areas with Company/Department goals.
• Create self-serve tools and processes to scale program planning, execution, and reporting.
• Manage cross-functional partnerships (e.g., PM, Eng, SRE) cross Infrastructure and GitLab.
• Manage the internal infrastructure roadmap and interaction with internal customers.
• Provide temporary leadership for Engineering teams - in times of transition.
• Drive operations: process improvements, OKR planning, program reviews, compliance, bug SLO, etc.
• Hold regular retrospectives on what processes work well across the organization and look to normalize and support adoption across groups to increase productivity and decrease cognitive overhead.

What do we NOT do?

• Take over EM’s role and responsibilities in managing engineering resources and engineering deliveries
• Facilitate team’s execution without influence
• Be a “catch-all” - TPMs are not the default owners for everything the Team is not going to do

What are some of the guidelines to work with us?

• Get us involved as early as possible: strategy discussions, summits, PRD and Design reviews. The more we know, the more we can help.
• We can provide guidance on programs, processes and team structure. Beyond numbers and status reports, we have a good idea of what is happening on the ground. We also have a wealth of experience running diverse programs and have seen many success/failure patterns.
• We have limited bandwidth and therefore can take on a limited number of programs. We will work with you to make sure we tackle the highest business priorities. Tradeoffs may be required.
• Don’t pull us in too late. It is not reasonable to ask your TPM to make the launch happen when they have not been part of the planning process.
• Self-serve is a good option in some cases. When we cannot provide TPM support, we will offer suggestions for how you can take the initiative forward on yourself - with some oversight from us.

Team

Members

Name	Role
Ethan Guo	Director, Infrastructure Technical Program Management

Projects

The TPM team drives complex cross functional programs at GitLab. The list below contains programs run by Infrastructure TPM team, ordered based on aligned priorities.

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