At Salesforce I ran a portfolio that spanned eight research and engineering teams across multiple clouds. Eight teams means eight roadmaps, eight backlogs, and eight different ideas about what was urgent. The work wasn't technical. It was sequencing.
The first move was making dependencies visible as a single picture. Each team could see its own plan. None of them could see how their plan collided with the other seven. I built one view of who needed what from whom and by when, and most of the early conflicts resolved themselves once people could see the collision coming.
The second move was protecting the critical path. On any program a few dependencies decide the whole timeline and the rest are noise. I spent my attention on the handful that gated everything else and let the teams self-manage the rest. Trying to track all of it equally is how a TPM burns out and still misses the date.
The hard part was compliance readiness layered on top: ISO, SOC2, and HIPAA gates that couldn't slip. Those became fixed points in the sequence that everything else planned around, not afterthoughts bolted on at the end.
The lesson that stuck: with many teams, your job isn't to coordinate everything. It's to find the few links that decide the outcome and guard them.