Program Management

Long ago, before there were any program managers (PMs), there were just developers, testers, and marketing people. The developers would build software they thought was interesting, and the marketing people would dive-bomb them every little while with the latest hot issue from a customer or magazine reviewer that had to get added or fixed. The developers found this frustrating, because it seemed like they were getting randomized a lot. The marketers found this annoying since the devs seemed pretty unresponsive and did not seem understand the customer or business issues.

The first PM at Microsoft was an Excel developer who decided to "take one for the team" and act as a buffer between the marketers and developers. He defined his role as a person who would go and figure out what these marketing people were really talking about and understand the customer needs or business problems so he could interpret those into actions the dev team had to take using his technical knowledge of what was possible and what was hard. I believe this was 1987, but I could be off by a year.

Program management proved to be such a useful role that it spread to other teams like Word and PowerPoint. This "jack of all trades" or "renaissance man" (to use the hoighty toighty term) acted as a hub of communication, and made the marketers job easier, since they had someone to talk to who could take the time to really understand the outside world, and the devs could talk to someone who spoke their language and was not ridiculous (not often at least).

Today there are many flavors of PMs. In some parts of the company, they define the APIs and write the technical documentation. In other parts, they are in charge of getting web sites updated every day, week or whatever interval. In Office, there are "design" PMs who mainly work on designing the products, "process" PMs who mainly work on driving processes that make sure we get things done, localization PMs who are sort of like process PMs but also sort of like developers in that they sometimes produce code and make bits that ship in the product, although usually by running tools that generate localized (translated) code, not by writing code.


Some years ago I realized that as a PM, my definition of vacation was not just going somewhere to have fun (work is quite fun most of the time). Vacation means getting to an environment where no decisions have to be made. I used to drive my friends nuts, since I would go visit them, and they'd say "what do you want to do?", or "where do you want to go?", and I would simply say "you decide".

Comments (17)

  1. Tejas Patel says:


    I learnt another important lesson today, thanks Chris.

  2. Thanks for the post. This is exactly how it is and this is exactly what makes it so worth while for people that like both worlds. Thanks.

  3. Chris Pratley Explains Program Management

  4. Chris Pratley Explains Program Management

  5. …is that they not only "pick up and run with the ball, they go find the ball". Excuse the extra focus on PMs, but stumbled on an interesting note about how PMs came to be at MS by Chris Prately….

  6. Enlightened says:

    ah, I think you just flipped the switch in my head. My last job was quite difficult to me because I was dubbed the "technical lead". But I ended up doing very little code and more driving the product forward. Things like making sure the localization people were happy, making sure the installs were coming along and had the knowledge they needed, answering mkting questions – I didn’t always know the details but knew who to ask.

    I felt simultaneously powerless and empowered. Powerless because of the flood of questions/decisions to make with so little technical details at my fingertips. Empowered because I could help steer the product and get other teams and my team members moving and enthused.

    Good writeup. Thanks!

  7. Ray Schraff says:

    Great piece.

    My non-MS viewpoint on PMs:

    1. Once they find the ball, PMs don’t pick up every ball themselves….

    but they own the task of making sure that every ball is picked up and carried to the correct endzone by SOMEBODY.

    2. PMs translate: technology ==> English

    3. PMs translate: English ==> technology

  8. Hind says:

    I’m reciently assigned as a graduate Programs Manager in an oline college. My pervious two years experience were not in educational feild.

    Accully, I’m facing deficulties and need any input about describing the expected role of the program manager in the On-line institutes specialy when the role become more administrative than academic.

  9. Doug Seven says:

    Program Manager – Who, what, where?

  10. paul says:

    Marketing is the WHAT? To many people today think Marketing is just about "selling", but it should be about creating NEW products that WILL sell.

  11. Greg says:

    Hi Chris,

    Thanks for the info – great post! I’ve been trying to get a good feel for what a PM does at Microsoft – this has been one of the most useful posts I’ve found that explains it.


  12. A potential intern sent me the following question:

    While my major is computer related, I’m afraid…

  13. Tina says:

    Well, this is certainly helpful.  I am being asked to sell myself as a Program Manager to my organization.  The company is very small, so I think this is like leading

Skip to main content