Ajita Kanchivakam Ananth has built her career in complex, high-stakes engineering environments where execution quality determines whether products scale or stall. As a Staff Technical Program Manager, she has led large, cross-functional programs that underpin how modern technology platforms are designed, built, and operated, with a focus on turning ambitious product goals into reliable, durable systems.
Her experience spans both consumer and enterprise technology, including leadership roles at Coinbase and DocuSign, where she drove major technical initiatives with global impact. In this conversation with Alltech Magazine, Ananth offers a candid, practitioner-led view of how technical program management has evolved into a strategic leadership function, sharing how TPMs shape organizational design, guide decision-making at scale, and help teams navigate complexity without sacrificing velocity or reliability.
Technical Program Management is often misunderstood as a delivery function. From your experience leading globally scaled products, how do you define the role of a TPM in shaping how complex systems are designed and built, not just shipped?
Yes, Technical Program Management as a discipline is relatively new to the industry as compared to traditional engineering roles. The role also varies across companies, which adds to the misconception about it.
I often describe a TPM’s role as organizational engineering, acting as the “COO” of a product. When people analyze why a product is successful, their minds immediately run to a great vision or a groundbreaking strategy. While those are critical, one of the hardest parts when operating at global scale is bridging the gap between abstract vision and reality. That’s where a TPM comes in.
TPMs operate at the intersection of strategy, systems, and people ensuring that what gets built is not just shipped, but is scalable, reliable, on-time, and sustainable over time.
My core value lies in distilling complexity: I absorb high-level business goals, technical constraints, and organizational noise, and synthesize them into a clear, decisive path forward.
This goes beyond simply creating plans; it requires proactively managing the constraints and dependencies that define how we deliver. Crucially, we ensure that architectural and product trade-offs are discussed early, with the right people in the room.
Beyond technology, TPMs design the operating rhythm, how collaboration happens, how decisions get made, and how information flows. We are the glue that holds teams together, building clarity and resilience even when things get chaotic.
So ultimately, we don’t just help deliver a product, we help build a framework within which an organization can operate, in order to design, launch, and scale successful products. This is exactly why technical program management is now a strategic function within the technology ecosystem.
You have led programs that serve users at a massive scale across different product environments. What changes when you move from building individual features to orchestrating systems that must perform reliably for millions of people every day?
Yes, I have worked on different types of programs across my career, spanning both consumer and enterprise products. What I’ve learnt is that, when scaling from features to ecosystems, the primary shift is treating reliability as a product feature in the early design phase. This is where a TPM leverages technical skills to proactively identify constraints, align key decisions and trade-offs with product and engineering teams to develop an architecture that scales well.
The key here is to design processes for failure scenarios because at this scale, it’s not a matter of if something breaks, but when. We as TPMs do this by creating what we call an operational playbook. This includes defining health metrics, establishing alerts and monitoring, and putting guardrails like feature flags and rollback mechanisms to ensure one small issue doesn’t take down the whole ship.
TPMs also play a vital role in operational resilience. When issues happen, we ensure that there is a well-defined incident management and triage process, with customer bug Service Level Objectives in place. This guarantees that customer issues are correctly prioritized and addressed promptly, ensuring users can rely on the product every single day.
As products grow in scale and complexity, the cost of misalignment increases dramatically. How do strong TPM practices reduce risk and enable organizations to scale without sacrificing reliability or velocity?
In complex, cross-functional programs, the primary risk is ambiguity, which stems from having a lot of moving pieces, too many cooks, and conflicting ideas. This leads to what we call execution debt. My role as a TPM is to play down this debt by designing an efficient team structure, without sacrificing velocity.
I start by engaging cross-functional teams early, like legal, compliance, marketing, customer success, and privacy. By treating them as true partners and using their expertise to shape constraints and risks early, we prevent surprises at the launch stage. I enforce clear ownership by appointing Directly Responsible Individuals, who are responsible and accountable for the outcome of a function, area, or workstream.
I then design a communication framework that ensures everyone is operating from the same playbook. In a matrixed organization, a multi-layered cadence is essential to ensure the right information reaches the right people.
My role is to ensure information flows efficiently across these layers. I leverage tools like cross team meetings, status reports, dependency mapping, and risk registers to build alignment across a diverse set of teams.
Finally, I guard against process for the sake of process. If a meeting or artifact doesn’t help us decide or unblock the team, I eliminate it. The TPM’s role is to design and maintain this rhythm so information flows predictably, decisions are timely, and teams remain aligned without creating unnecessary noise.
How has your experience across multiple high-impact technology environments shaped your perspective on effective program leadership?
Having navigated high-stakes programs across fintech, enterprise cloud, and consumer products, I have learnt that effective program leadership enables a team to seamlessly navigate change.
When priorities evolve, friction usually happens because the team loses the shared narrative. So I focus on building mechanisms to create clarity, ensuring that we remain dynamic enough to succeed despite the ambiguity.
While a well-defined roadmap is essential, it is never static. My role is to ensure that when the roadmap shifts, the narrative shifts with it, keeping the team aligned on why we are changing course, not just what is changing.
To achieve this, I create a shared prioritization framework. This helps anchor the team and drive alignment. It balances product goals with engineering resources, architectural constraints, and infrastructure capacity, while helping articulate rationale to leadership and dependency teams. This protects the team’s focus while ensuring we build the right things.
In large-scale programs, small decisions can have outsized downstream effects. How do you guide teams through complex trade-offs?
A core skill of a TPM is the ability to objectively drive decisions by aligning diverse perspectives. I build decision frameworks that translate complexity into clear choices.
I evaluate constraints like timeline, resources, dependencies, and architectural complexity. I list options with explicit trade-offs, risks, and downstream impacts, bring them to the right decision forums, ensure every decision has a clear owner, and define escalation paths.
By helping teams visualize the cost of every path, I empower deliberate decision making to protect the highest-value outcomes. I also ensure the framework aligns with organizational culture and scales to different decision types.
For the next generation of Technical Program Managers, what principles will define those who shape the future of technology at global scale?
My advice is to anchor growth in three principles: fostering trust, solving problems, and building empathy.
Trust is earned through competence. It is not enough to track dates. You must understand the work. I ground my approach in deep knowledge of the product and architecture, participating in design and architectural discussions to challenge assumptions and advocate for engineers.
Secondly, you cannot solve a problem you don’t understand. I start with a listening tour to identify pain points and solve them, which builds trust and strong relationships quickly.
Finally, empathy is key. TPMs introduce the human element to product development. By filtering signal from noise and helping the organization grow, a TPM becomes the person teams rely on when it matters most.
As AI and infrastructure complexity increase, the ability to deliver reliably and sustainably at scale is a competitive advantage. That is exactly what a strong TPM enables.
