Technical Product Manager - Developer Productivity

AppFolio•Chicago, IL

12d

About The Position

We’re innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We’re more than just a software company — we’re a cloud-based powerhouse that creates products to make our customers’ lives easier. We’re revolutionizing the way people do business, and we want your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your passion to help us keep on innovating. We listen to our customers; it’s in our DNA. Most of our product development teams focus on our company’s customers and their needs. Some of us have internal customers instead: other product developers. This is one of those roles; you’d be joining a team that is responsible for crafting a software development experience that your fellow AppFolio product developers will love, so that they can focus their creativity on making our product even more awesome for our company’s customers. Developer Productivity Mission We're evolving AppFolio’s internal developer platform to support clear domain ownership and continuous delivery, so every team can build high-quality software quickly and confidently. The Developer Productivity team empowers engineers with scalable architecture, tools, and guidance that remove complexity and boost efficiency. We focus on high-leverage work, support a platform-first mindset, and step in to solve critical issues when no one else can. Your Mission The successful candidate will be instrumental in elevating our engineering velocity and experience by bringing to life a new Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) platform. Your mission is to identify and prioritize the most impactful developer experience challenges within our day-to-day development tools and processes, inspiring the team to deliver innovative solutions that empower product development teams to deploy hundreds of code commits weekly with increasing quality, speed, and happiness. You will be the advocate for simplified and stabilized deployment experiences, partnering with fellow TPMs to establish documented frameworks and best practices, and collaborating closely with engineers across the organization to generalize their creative solutions, ultimately leading the charge towards true continuous deployment for all our product components. About the Role We believe that a good leader is passionate about their thing and gets things done effectively by fostering healthy team dynamics. They work closely with engineers from product development teams and fellow platform teams to build and communicate platform features, priorities, and requirements. This is a high-visibility, hands-on position that requires commitment, ownership, flexibility, careful planning, and attention to detail, all with an engaging and personal approach. And can we have some fun while we’re doing it? We think so.

Requirements

You have excellent organizational skills, analytical capabilities, and attention to detail
You have strong written and verbal communication and presentation skills, for both technical and non-technical audiences
You have hands-on experience or a technical understanding of cloud technologies, enterprise software, and IT delivery, particularly within domains that demand strong governance, compliance, and security
You have informed perspectives on software architecture and can articulate the vision of a platform that provides the best experience for developers
You can operate under limited supervision, as this individual can operate, drive results, and set priorities independently
You have a track record of driving and delivering large, complicated projects on time and within scope
You have the ability to develop and execute a successful product roadmap
You have an entrepreneurial spirit/ability to roll up your sleeves and try different things with minimal direction
You have knowledge of key product and program management principles, agile, scrum, and UX centered design principles
You can balance the needs of UX, DX, and ease of implementation when delivering platform improvements
You have solid leadership, communication, and presentation skills, both written and oral
You have a proven ability to build strong cross-functional relationships
You have the ability to collaborate across multiple functions, driving toward a common goal
You possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy; a big-picture vision, the drive to make that vision a reality, and are technically credible to lead teams of best-in-class software developers
You love and understand technology. You stay up to date on trends and disruptors in the software development and IT markets
You enjoy describing, evangelizing, and are generally interested in talking about the positive impacts that technology can have
Knowledge and understanding of software requirements gathering and use cases development

Nice To Haves

Experience with lean product planning and scoping techniques, such as user story mapping or design thinking
Experience with product management roadmapping tools such as Jira Advanced Roadmaps, Aha, Productboard, Roadmunk, or ProductPlan
Experience with agile development workflow tools such as Jira, GitHub Issues, and Trello
Experience with the launch and adoption of internal developer platforms and tools
Familiarity with application definition and continuous delivery tools such as Helm, Backstage, GitHub Actions, and ArgoCD
Familiarity with service orchestration and management tools such as Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio, and etcd

Responsibilities

Work with engineering leaders and technical product managers (peers) from other business segments, to help shape the technical vision and execute on delivering customer value
Lead use case development, requirements gathering, requirements analysis, and transform product and developer needs into strong platform concepts
Innovate and improve the platform that internal developers use every day by promoting an ecosystem of developer tools and best practices so that the best technology is adopted to deliver customer value
Own a platform product lifecycle from requirements gathering through production, delivery, and adoption
Identify the right success metrics to evaluate platform impact, adoption, and developer experience improvements, ensuring that product decisions are data-informed
Build business cases that address significant technology needs and efficiency opportunities, demonstrating how platform improvements can provide a competitive advantage. Can pitch on the “what” and “why”
Provide technical expertise in identifying, evaluating, and developing solutions that are cost-effective and meet product development and business needs.
Responsible for platform capabilities definition: necessary features and functionality, and the release criteria; Studies platform usability, analyzes technology trends to identify new opportunities for platform improvement
Strives to be a subject matter expert in their strategic focus area(s) by identifying the challenges our developers face and defining new opportunities to improve our developer experience
Be the go-to source of knowledge for the benefits of adopting new platform capabilities
Make trade-off decisions between possible and desirable, which requires a developed sense of what is technically feasible
Engage frequently with product development and fellow platform teams: facilitate discussions, provide clarification, provide input on requirement acceptance and refinement, testing and validation, contribute to design activities and decisions
Meet with engineering leaders to shape the platform roadmap
Partner with engineering leadership and plan for platform improvement launches, collaborating on adoption plans as appropriate for any launches impacting downstream product development teams and processes
Communicate and share with both internal (inside AppFolio) and external audiences (outside AppFolio) the business problems, developer challenges, and creative and interesting approaches we are taking to fulfill these needs