PMI Silicon Valley: How TPMs Drive Complex Cross-Functional Programs

I'll be joining PMI Silicon Valley on 25 November 2026 for a PM Insights session titled “Leading Without Authority: How TPMs Drive Complex Cross-Functional Programs.” PM Insights is the chapter's virtual educational series, run on Wednesday evenings for project, program and technical program managers across Silicon Valley.

This is the practitioner version of a topic that usually gets covered as a soft skill. Leading without authority is not a personality trait and it is not diplomacy training. It is a set of mechanisms: how you make dependencies visible enough that nobody can quietly deprioritise them, how you make the cost of delay legible to the person who controls the resource, and how you build a track record that means your escalation is believed the one time you use it.

The test I use is simple. If you had to pull rank or escalate to get something done, you did not influence anyone – you borrowed someone else's authority. The session is about the difference.

I wrote about the underlying idea at length in Leading Without Authority: The Operating System of a Technical Program Manager.