Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your host Mario Gerard. Today, we have a very interesting guest with us, David Glick. A lot of you might know him. He’s been a mentor. He does a lot of linkedin posts and he’s a cool person to follow, so do follow him. 

He’s worked at Amazon For 19 years and was a VP of Amazon fulfillment technologies. And then Amazon tickets. He left Amazon to go join as a CTO of flex. He has incredible, incredible experience in building high performing teams and building high performing organizations, some very excited to have today with us and share his thoughts. 

David, thank you for being here with us today. And why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience?

David Glick: Yeah. Hi, this is Dave click. Thanks for having me on Mario. You did a great job of introducing me, but I can say that most all of my career was at Amazon for almost 20 years. I’ve been at flex as CTO for the last three years. And so it’s been a fun ride at both of those places and I’m sure we’ll get into some of the things I did both at Amazon and flex. So I won’t take too much time with that here.

What flex is doing

Mario Gerard: Do you wanna like quickly go over like what flex is doing and maybe do a pitch because I know you guys are hiring like crazy too.

David Glick: So yeah. Flex is a marketplace which matches enterprise shippers. That’s big retailers and brands with logistics capabilities or fulfillment capabilities. And we work with six of the top 10 retailers in the us and we are building our own WMS, building our own transportation network and so on. 

And so we’re always looking for TPMS engineers, product managers, basically everything.

Mario Gerard: Everything, whole nine yards. Now that’s amazing. Did you say four of the top 10 retailers?

David Glick: Six of the top 10.

Mario Gerard: Six of the top 10 retailers, you work with six of the top 10 retailers in managing their logistic process?

David Glick: Yeah.

Mario Gerard: That’s something

David Glick: My goal for 2022 has been to, i’ve been assigned to get the other four.

Mario Gerard: That’s incredible that being operational only for like a couple of years and you’re able to do that, that says something about the product. So thank you so much for being here, David, to our listeners. What we are gonna do today is we’re gonna split the podcast, kinda two sections. The first section, we’re gonna talk about David and ask him what he thinks are the fundamentals of the TPM roles. We’ll go about the, we’ll asking questions about the role, the skillset, how to be a great TPM and those kinda things. 

And then the second part, we’re gonna ask him and we’re gonna like work around the topic of how high level leaders like David, who VP of like a hundred or thousand people or several thousands of people. How do they get the right people working on the right set of problems? And that’s what we’re gonna focus on on the second part. So let’s get started with kinda the first part here. So David, why don’t you kinda give us your take on what would you describe as a TPM role and, and the function of the TPM role?

David Glick: Yeah. Thank you. The number one thing that the TPM does is deliver. Like if you summed up the role in one word, it’ll be delivery. And so their job is to get projects or programs over the line on schedule and under budget or at budget. 

And so what does that mean? Have to be very detail oriented drive and your number one tool is the Gant chart, right? When are people going to get things done? What do they depend on, how much time is it going to take? And so you could stop there and say, that’s the job of the TPM, but what I found, and I don’t have a CS degree and Amazon talks about big T technical being someone who can write code and little T technical, being someone like me, who has led in technical places, but can’t write code. 

Anyway, What I always found is that if I was a little more technical, I would be more effective. And I guess if I was a lot more technical, what would be a lot more effective, but the point being, being able to understand deeply the trade offs, both in technology, as well as in your domain makes folks much more effective tpms. 

And so you own the schedule, you own the resources, or you don’t actually own the resources, but you control the resources that you don’t own. And then you have to be good at making trade offs and getting people to commit.

Large Scale Project – Managing heavy dependencies and resource management

Mario Gerard: That’s an interesting take. I also like about when you spoke about G charts. That’s a very interesting take because though we work in tech, it’s interesting that a lot of large scale tech projects are actually managed, though They worked at an agile level, right? Like teams are working independently, they are managed at a milestone level. 

And I think it’s kind of forgotten sometimes that large scale projects we do use Gant charts. We do use Microsoft project to something very similar it to that Smartsheet or something like that, where we manage these heavy dependencies and resource management, right?

David Glick: Yeah. And I was working on a project for, at Amazon around pricing and we were working with a subsidiary team and they were in San Francisco. This was before everybody was remote, but they were in San Francisco. We were in Seattle and we weren’t getting the progress we wanted from them. And so my boss said, okay, let’s get on a plane. We flew down to San Francisco and we sat with them all day. And we like went through all the stories and the sticky sheets and all the things you do for agile. 

And at the end of the day, I said, great. When can you deliver? And the guy said, well, many software development professionals today think it’s not necessary to have delivery dates cause it’s not effective. And I was like, look, I’m about to fly back to reality. And there’s an angry guy with an SVP on his t-shirt who’s gonna yell at me if I don’t have dates. And so it is fine and dandy to have this agile. 

And by the way, i’ve run agile teams. And I think it’s actually the right way. But You have to have some high level understanding because if you’ve got teams, you know, dozens of people or hundreds of people working together on a project, it all has to come together at the end.

Mario Gerard: And there’s no way to do it rather than go old school tradit and use Gant chars and use Microsoft project or something. Some kinda similar type of a tool, which gives you that level of granularity and tracking because otherwise you’re not gonna be successful, especially if you’re running these large scale projects. 

David Glick: One of my colleagues and friends from early days of Amazon, we didn’t use Gant charts. We used, he just used Excel.

And in the end, like a project or a TPMS job is to get a set of action items and then action items defined as sort of a description, an owner and a date, get a set of those and probably a dependency, get a set of those written down with owners and dates and that will allow you to March forward. 

And so he would just come in and say, what are the five most important milestones on this project? Yeah. And you know, who’s the owner and when’s it gonna be due. And if we couldn’t get a date, we got a date for a date.