I’m a new developer experience PM, and I was wondering if it was a good functional area to specialize in if I don’t have a technical background. My biggest challenge is understanding the PM role on a developer experience team since the SWEs on the team should be most attune to their pain points and best understand the potential solutions. YOE: 6 (1 in product) TC: 185k
I enjoy being a devx PM but it is not any easy role. Yes, you do need to be technical (background makes it easier but can be self-taught) to have enough confidence with the team. Do you code on the side? Confident enough to use the software the team makes? How deep in the stack and how focused on devs matters too. Making tools for graphic shaders? Maybe too deep. Developer site or IDE plugins? Not so bad. I've mostly had success by being on good terms with the EM where we can split responsibility. However, my current team has made me question devx PMing. The engineers are running on their own and explicitly say, "how does a PM help?" Maybe they don't! But need to be on a team with a xfn culture. One other point is being careful about roles. Are you a devx PM for a company that targets devs or more of an internal team for dev efficiency? Devx can be hard to show impact so know where the role sits strategically. All that being said, there is no shortage of need for a devx PM. They just think differently and doesn't attract a lot of PMs (see above) or can get by with a product minded eng. I get pings constantly by companies launching their first dev product/api.
This is a golden answer…answers like this are rare in blind 👍
It is a great domain but making an impact in that area will be extremely hard even for a technical person..can you suggest a feature for gitlab or github on top of your mind without asking a clarifying question ? Or have a rough idea how you can improve pain points faced by admins during vmware workload migration or can you analyse the few good points wrt api experience provided by mercedez benz in their dev portal for vehicle data apis ? These are few scenarios which came to my mind ..i am not exactly pm but i can assure you it is a difficult domain..ofcourse you can pick it up if you put extra hours in studying on your own and if you have genuine interest in this All the best 👍