TPM Stories — Galed Friedmann from Snowflake
Interviewed by Iris Yuan
I’m originally from Israel and have been living in the US for the last 10 years. I was always a tech nerd even before I knew what tech was, one of my early memories was taking apart old dial phones and radios just to figure out how they work and what’s inside! My first tech job was doing system administration and network design for my high school, all of which I learnt on my own using books and internet guides. All this knowledge early on helped me get selected for one of the technology units in the army where I was exposed to real life production systems at scale.
Connect with Galed on LinkedIn.
Tell us about your career journey — how has your career transformed and how did you become a TPM?
I started my career as a systems engineer and part of a group that was responsible for managing highly production infrastructure for mission critical systems. Very early on I realized my passion for people management and influencing strategy, I became a team leader after a couple of years in the role and eventually headed the infrastructure group I originally started at. After leaving the army I joined a startup that was later acquired by Facebook, and that was when I made the official transition to TPM, and haven’t looked back since! I worked on a wide variety of programs — product development, growth, telecom partnerships, and infrastructure security at Facebook, security and reliability at Stripe, and today I am managing the Database Engineering TPM team at Snowflake.
I feel that I’ve always been a TPM at heart before knowing this role existed. I enjoy taking ambiguous problems and finding the right path for execution. I like being a jack of all trades and using this knowledge to solve the big picture problem and set direction for success.
You have managed a variety of different product areas and teams. How have your previous roles shaped you as a TPM and manager?
What I like about being a TPM is that we can move across industries and specialities quite easily. TPMs are not usually expected to be the experts in their field (though it never hurts), we rely on our big picture understanding and technical acumen to drive effective execution.
Each role that I took taught me something different about the industry and gave me more tools and “street smarts” to apply for future challenges. As an example, I found that my experience with consumer products and involvement in product strategy and design became very useful when I moved to infrastructure where product managers are not often present, and I had to wear that hat, amongst many others.
Where do you think TPMs can add the most value? What ways can TPMs contribute to the business’s success?
I think TPMs add the most value when we are aligned to a broad company/business strategy. We contribute to the business’ success by figuring out how to achieve the goal, translate it into chewable pieces and ensure that all players are working towards that goal efficiently.
One of the most important roles that I have as a TPM manager is to make sure we align TPMs with those high level objectives and couple our goals with the outcomes of the program. I want to make sure that we are goal oriented rather than mapped to a team, TPMs bring the most value when they work across teams and organizations to deliver the business outcome.
What is the most memorable program that you have driven as a TPM? What made it so memorable?
The internet.org initiative at Facebook is definitely the most memorable and unique experience I ever had. Our objective was to grow connectivity and internet usage in emerging markets through various products and solutions. The most memorable was our Wi-Fi initiative where we deployed affordable public access points in schools, market places and town squares, where there is no stable infrastructure or internet access. One of my responsibilities was the integrations and deployments of our product with ISP partners. I traveled to many rural places across India, Africa, and Southeast Asia to ensure that our deployment programs are executing successfully and find the best technical solutions to problems on the ground.
What I loved the most is seeing the impact our product is making. There were many times we returned to locations where we had the product deployed and saw real people using our service to look for jobs, study and look up information for school, and small business owners reaching out to customers.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a TPM? How did you overcome it?
One of the biggest challenges I often face is setting expectations with stakeholders and peers outside of TPM on what it is that we do and the value we add to the organization. I’ve had to do this at almost every role and team I had, as an IC and especially as a manager. TPM has different meanings and expectations in different companies (and sometimes even between orgs in the same place), and people have different ideas of what to expect based on previous experience. It is even a bigger challenge when that previous experience was negative, and we have to prove ourselves even more and earn stakeholders’ trust.
As a manager, a big portion of my time is allocated to expectation setting, inside and out. I make sure that our goals and responsibilities are well documented and shared with stakeholders, and I set those goals based on my familiarity with the needs and priorities of the business. I spend a lot of my time meeting leaders, EMs, and other stakeholders to reiterate our expectations and where we can be even more impactful. I also do this internally within my team, identifying areas where we can be making more impact and coach my team on how to handle these situations.
Sometimes in order for us to make more impact, we also need to free up our time so we have cycles to work on other priorities. Situation that often happens is after working on a program for some time, it reaches a point where the heavy lifting efforts are done and it switches into maintenance mode. I had to deal with cases where the TPM stayed working on the program as an operator, and the value we could add as TPMs diminished rapidly. The team continued making a case for a need for a TPM, but it was clear the work now is mostly operational. I worked together with the TPM, engineering manager and senior leadership to define the exit and success criteria for the program and what “done” should look like, and we agreed that once the program achieves that stable state, we should hand off the operational work to an appropriate team and people to own it long term.
In your current role, what are key technologies you drive or collaborate on? How do you keep up with the latest developments?
I recently joined Snowflake, where I lead the Database Engineering TPM team. We work on a wide variety of programs, from performance and optimization of our analytics query execution, to building new capabilities like Hybrid Tables. We are looking for more great TPMs to join the team so please apply if this sounds interesting to you!
I actually did not have expertise in database internals and development prior to joining Snowflake, and I spent a lot of time in the past few months learning and expanding my knowledge, and it’s been a blast! Snowflake has a large library of internal knowledge and training videos, recording of tech talks and documentation, and I’ve been leveraging all of those to build up my knowledge and understand how the different pieces of the machine work together. I also looked for external documentation and books that I can read to deepen my understanding in general about products similar to ours and how they work.
I’m leveraging past experiences I had working on large distributed systems, first I want to make sure I understand all the components that make the system and their role in general, this allows me to start speaking the same language with the rest of the group. I then identify the areas I need to go deeper, learn the internal concepts and how they work on their own, and their dependencies on other systems.
TPMs — What’s your story? If you are interested in contributing or sharing your story, please reach out!
