What is a Technical Product Manager and why do you need one? • Schuyler Bishop • PlatformCon 2022

Technical Product Managers are key for a successful internal platform. Why?
The platform’s job is to serve its users needs. These users are typically the company’s internal developers, other internal technical consumers of cloud or infrastructure or other stakeholders in the company wishing to deploy custom developer or COTS software.
How you understand these internal customers and their needs must influence the design and prioritization of your internal platform. Identifying your use cases, relating them to the needs of these internal developers and prioritizing them by business value lets you show early wins and prove the return on investment of your internal platform.
In this talk Schuyler will give an overview on:
- What is a Technical Product Manager (TPM) for internal platforms and what do they do?
- Why do you need a TPM for your internal platform and tooling?
- How does a TPM create value?
Speaker: Schuyler Bishop, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at NinjaHoldings.
Bio: Schuyler started in tech in 1995 by founding an ISP in his parent’s garage using three self-built servers and Slackware on the 1.1.13 kernel. For the next decade and a half he was an individual contributor focusing on Linux and network administration but then realized he was getting boneheaded decisions from above. So Schuyler became a boneheaded leader himself, working to create better systems for engineers to themselves make good decisions.

[@schrapj]

Fantastic story telling!