Where Did the PM and the Scrum Master Go in RACE?
Inside a RACE project the Project Manager and the Scrum Master did not survive as separate roles. Their work folded into AI Product, and agents now assemble the status and tracking. Where several Pit Walls have to converge on one result, RACE adds one coordinating role, the TPM (Technical Program Manager). It owns the clock and leaves every answer with its owner.
Inside one project, the work folded into AI Product
The framework collapses six functions into one AI-native role. The AI Product card absorbs the Product Owner, Business Analyst, Project Manager, UX, Test Lead, and Scrum Master. Coordination overhead built to synchronize a seven-to-nine person team is removed. A small AI-augmented team needs no ceremony owners to stay aligned.
The Pit Wall has no separate ceremony owner. As the guide for Scrum teams notes, the Scrum Master evolves into AI Product, the specification half of the Pit Wall.
The distinction between project and product management remains strict. The Project Manager maps to AI Product on the Pit Wall. The Product Manager maps client-side to the Team Principal. The Pit Wall mediates all feedback, and the Team Principal never communicates directly with the Pit Crew.
The bookkeeping went to agents
Status aggregation and tracking are the first tasks automation clears. Jason Flynn of Scaled Agile observed in September 2026 that AI can automate status updates, summarizes sprint progress, flags risks, and streamlines cross-team communication. The most exposed roles rely on information relay, meeting facilitation, and status aggregation.
Flynn notes that durable coordination focuses on judgment, conflict resolution, and capability development. In RACE, an agent assembles the cross-team picture: each team’s Executable Product Roadmap and Executable Product Backlog, real-time status, and risks. The TPM works from that picture: sequencing, trade-offs between teams, when to escalate. So inside one project the PM’s and the Scrum Master’s work still has owners: AI Product for the decisions, agents for the bookkeeping.
The coordination gap between Pit Walls
Scaling exposes an unaddressed boundary. The comparison with SAFe notes that a program once requiring an Agile Release Train of 50 to 125 people can often be delivered by a handful of micro-teams. The framework did not say who makes that handful converge.
The RACE Engineer does not fill this void. As the scaling essay describes, the RACE Engineer develops delivery machinery, including agents, workflows, guardrails, and evals. That role sits above projects, part-time and on request, the way DevOps does today. Converging several teams is a different job.
The role is TPM
The industry already has a name for this discipline: Technical Program Manager. Amazon describes the role at Annapurna Labs directly: “This is not a status-reporting role.” Amazon expects the TPM to connect engineering workstreams into a single coherent schedule, identify the real critical path week to week, and drive cross-functional decisions.
Mario Gerard marks the boundary: “TPMs don’t decide how to build, and they don’t manage engineers.” A TPM aligns teams and drives the plan, but does not make deep technical decisions or execute directly through engineers.
RACE gives the TPM the decision rights that keep it from sliding into a status collector. The TPM alone decides sequencing between teams, the critical path, the rhythm of forums and the risk register. It also sets a deadline for every dispute between teams, and a dispute still open at its deadline escalates with a decision date.
Everything else the TPM escalates to its owner. Product priorities go to the Team Principal and AI Product, architecture to the Forward Deployed Engineer. People go to line managers and leadership; scope and budget go to the Team Principal and, on the delivery side, to leadership.
The Sporting Director metaphor
The Formula 1 metaphor clarifies the division of labor. In F1, a race engineer works one car from the garage. The Sporting Director sits on the pit wall and runs race operations for the whole team, across both cars. The Team Principal operates in a wider zone: budget, sponsors, and long-term strategy.
In RACE, AI Product and the Forward Deployed Engineer decide what to build and how for their own Pit Wall, as a race engineer works one car. The TPM aligns plans and dependencies across the Pit Walls and overrides none of their decisions. It keeps the Team Principal’s stakeholders, neighboring teams, outside resources and sponsor informed. Product work still goes through the Pit Wall.
TPM is the title; Sporting Director is only the metaphor. Several Pit Walls converging on one result need that seat, and in RACE the TPM takes it.
What the role is not
A common objection claims that RACE removed the coordinator only to restore it one level up. If that were true, the overhead built to synchronize a seven-to-nine person team would come back, now over a program that once took an Agile Release Train of 50 to 125 people. The coordinator inside the team is gone and stays gone.
The TPM owns no backlog and manages no people, and agents handle the bookkeeping. Leadership decides whether a project needs a TPM when it forms the team. On a given project the TPM may work part-time. RACE scales through machinery, so one TPM can own delivery of more than one project from inside each.
The TPM is distinct from every legacy post. A Scrum Master optimizes one team from within, and that care folded into AI Product along with the project manager’s execution. A line manager evaluates people and a RACE Engineer builds machinery; the TPM does neither. So the overhead stays gone: the TPM is one seat that leadership adds only to the projects that need it.
Inside one Pit Wall nobody needs to keep the clock: AI Product decides and agents keep the record. Where several Pit Walls converge, the TPM keeps it. It holds decision rights over the schedule and none over the answer, and it sits only where leadership puts it.
Written by Pavel Khodalev, author of RACE Programming and CTO of First Line Software. Follow new essays via RSS.
