A Day in the Life Of A TPM During a Code Yellow
written by Nomi Khedawala, Technical Program Manager
Intro
I’m Nomi (Know-Me).
I joined Reddit as a Technical Program Manager in October 2024. I came from a background in product operations and technical program management, and what drew me to Reddit was the pace and the scale of the problems (and being a longtime lurker). I’ve had the opportunity to work on so many different areas of the business in my tenure here so far: Games on Reddit, Age Verification, Data Foundations, and even Search and Answers!
I'm part of the Tech PMO team, Reddit's centralized team for Technical Program Managers. Each of us manages programs for a specific org, set of teams, or one-off high priority initiatives. I recently wrapped up a company-wide Code Yellow focused on our consumer data foundations, and I'd like to share with you what a typical Thursday has been like for me during this Code Yellow.
If you're not familiar with Code Yellows at Reddit: they're our mechanism for escalating specific operational issues. When a problem is too big or too cross-cutting to fix through normal prioritization, we declare a Code Yellow. Think 4-6 week sprints with clear exit criteria and a temporary but significant shift in engineering priorities. They're designed to converge fast on a set of goals.
The Code Yellow I led alongside Paul Raff, our Data Foundations Lead, spanned the full consumer data supply chain across 10 surface areas. We defined how events should be instrumented, stood up real-time data quality monitoring, built curated data tables from raw events through aggregates and cubes, migrated metrics, and established a steady state operating model so the work would persist beyond the Code Yellow. It's the kind of program where the scope keeps wanting to expand and the TPM's job is to hold the line on what "done" actually means.
What follows is a snapshot of a typical Thursday during the Code Yellow. Thursdays were my heaviest day. Here's what one looked like.
Morning: 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
8:00 AM - I start the day by facilitating a session of our Collaborative Problem Solving forum. This is something I built and run for our TPM team. The intent is that we get together every other week to work through real challenges we're each facing on our programs and look for opportunities to standardize how we operate. It's part peer support, part playbook development. Today I'm running a quarterly check-in to make sure the forum is still hitting the mark for the team.
9:00 AM - CPS wraps and I shift into Code Yellow mode. I'm reading through Slack messages that came in overnight and earlier this morning,. answering Qquestions from engineers on the Code Yellow and a thread with Paul about one of our exit criteria. I'm also reviewing every tracker, timeline doc, and milestone artifact to make sure nothing material has changed since we sent the Steer Co agenda out 48 hours ago. The Steer Co is a meeting with our executive sponsors and stakeholders, it’s later this morning and I want to be sure we walk in with a complete and current picture.
10:00 AM - Paul and I co-host office hours for any Code Yellow participant withquestions about scope, timelines, goals, or non-goals. These sessions are some of the most useful meetings on the calendar because the questions get genuinely technical. Today we're working through how to structure the data supply chain from raw events through fact tables, aggregates, and cubes. Someone raises a question about backfill strategies and the cost tradeoffs for different look-back periods. Another engineer wants to talk through whether we should have separate fact tables for web vs. mobile or consolidate by platform group. Paul and I don't always have the answer on the spot, but we talk it through with our counterparts and agree on a path forward whether that's deferment, fast-follow, or recommendation to senior leadership.
10:30 AM - More prep for the Steer Co. I'm pressure-testing each section of the agenda we drafted earlier this week. Is the status accurate as of this morning? Are the risks framed clearly enough for a room of senior leaders and our execs to act on? Do we need to add more context about a risk?
11:30 AM - I lead the Steer Co. This is our steering committee meeting with our CTO, CPO, VPs, and Directors. We share the program's current health, walk through progress against our five exit criteria, flag risks and blockers, and lay out what they should expect between now and our next check-in. Steer Cos are not the place for surprises. The prep I did all morning is so that every question gets a clear answer.
Afternoon: 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM
12:00 PM - Straight from the Steer Co into the cross-functional engineering sync. This is where I gather status updates from all of the eng teams contributing to the Code Yellow. We talk through their progress, timeline changes, risks, and I share relevant outputs from the Steer Co we just finished. Information has to flow quickly upwards and outwards during a Code Yellow. The engineers executing the work need to know what leadership is thinking, and leadership needs to know what progress is being made week over week.
12:30 PM - I meet 1:1 with a teammate to talk about how we can make the CPS forum even better. This week's session was my quarterly assessment, so we're comparing notes on what's working, what's not, and how to make the outputs more actionable. My goal is to take these findings, write up a retro, and present it to my manager and Sr. Director later to establish a baseline and start folding the best ideas into our team's standard operating procedures.
1:00 PM - Lunch. I close the laptop, make some coffee, and spend time catching up with my wife. One of the genuine perks of working from home is being able to take an actual break with the people you live with. Thumper, our cat, hates to see me coming, but I have to get a good arm wrestling match in with him so he doesn't sleep all day.
2:00 PM - Back at my desk. I go through my raw notes from the Steer Co and start synthesizing them into a stakeholder summary: key takeaways, discussion points, action items, and owners. Before I send it out, I reach out to each action item owner individually via Slack to confirm they're aligned on ownership and timelines. I learned a long time ago that assigning someone an action item in a meeting recap they didn't agree to is a fast way to create confusion and lose trust.
2:30 PM - I start drafting the weekly update that goes out to our Code Yellow participants and leadership. Milestones, health of each exit criteria, timelines, what moved forward this week, what risks or blockers surfaced, and how we're addressing them. This is one of those artifacts where the quality of the writing matters as much as the substance. If leaders can't parse your update in under 3 minutes, they stop reading it.
3:00 PM - I switch gears to the CPS retro. I'm taking the notes from my 1:1 earlier and incorporating them into the retrospective document I'm drafting for my manager and Sr. Director. The goal is to establish a clear baseline for the forum's performance and propose specific improvements that could be codified into how we run the CPS forum. This is the kind of work that doesn't show up on a sprint board but compounds over time.
3:30 PM - I'm starting to wrap up. I respond to Slack messages I couldn't get to earlier, schedule a few messages for teammates in different time zones, and share my draft weekly update with my program leads so they can add their content. I'll revise and edit tomorrow morning and get it out before the end of day Friday.
What a TPM Actually Does
A TPM's job is to make sure that the right things are happening at the right time and that everyone has what they need to focus on what they're good at. I handle the coordination, the communication, the risk identification, the stakeholder management, and the organizational scaffolding that lets a program with dozens of contributors across multiple teams actually converge on a set of milestones and objectives.
I love being a TPM because I love to be a part of other people's successes. Being a TPM means that you wear multiple hats so that the people around you can have peace of mind that all of the peripheral stuff is being handled while they can focus on their craft. TPMs are enforcers, enablers, coaches, communicators, therapists, and most importantly... friends not food! 🐟
If you're interested in becoming a Snoo, check out our open roles: https://redditinc.com/careers