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Program Manager perspective
Lens: Coordination at scale — dependencies, milestones, release trains, and risk across multiple teams sharing the same lifecycle gates.
Phase by phase
| Phase | Your job | Key artifacts | Guides & SOPs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Cross-team priority alignment | Portfolio backlog | SOP-001 |
| Define | Dependency on shared ADRs/specs | Shared API contracts | Planning & ADR |
| Build | Track blocked teams waiting on G1 | Dependency board | — |
| Verify | Integration milestone dates | Cross-team E2E window | Automated testing |
| Release | Release train calendar | Coordinated deploy order | CI/CD · SOP-006 |
| Operate | Major incident stakeholder comms | Program status report | Incident mgmt |
| Learn | Trend: repeat cross-team failures | Program retro | SOP-008 |
Metrics you track
| Metric | Why |
|---|---|
| ADR time-to-accept (cross-team) | Define-phase bottleneck |
| % work starting before G1 | Process debt |
| Cross-service integration test pass rate | Contract discipline |
| Sev-1 count by program increment | Quality trend |
| Error budget burn by service | Release readiness |
Who you collaborate with
| Role | When |
|---|---|
| POs | Priority conflicts across teams |
| Architect / ARB | Shared platform decisions |
| Team leads | Capacity and milestone slips |
| DevOps | Release train windows |
| Security / compliance | Regulated release gates |
Pitfalls (Program Manager view)
| Pitfall | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Forcing shared deadline without shared spec | No G1 → no start |
| Hiding team-level quality debt | Escaped defect roll-up |
| Big-bang integration week | Continuous contract tests |
| Ignoring data governance on cross-team data flows | Data governance early |