AMA: GitHub Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Developer Product Management
April 3 @ 10:00AM PST
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GitHub Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Developer Product Management
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
Quite technical, because you cannot have the requisite level of empathy for the target user, not to mention be credible with your engineering team if you aren't. Now, I do think that a mistake that PM hiring managers for devtools often make is trying to optimize for specific knowledge in a partic......Read More
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
It can vary from not-terribly-technical to quite technical. This depends on how complex your product is and how much the nuances of that complexity matter to the user's success with it. As an example, GitHub Actions has sophisticated features like matrix builds for parallelization, required and r......Read More
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
Lots of changes are happening, chiefly motivated by the end of free money (i.e. post-ZIRP era) and the rise of AI. I know everyone has probably heard these two themes a million times before so let me break it down specifically for this area. The end of free money has been talked about a lot on t......Read More
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
We divide up the team by domain area and then map existing features and area-specific outcomes to them as much as possible. Obviously, it's not always possible to create a MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) division of areas of responsibility (AoRs) among all PMs, but I am constan......Read More
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
Quite a lot. But one has to be cautious in this and have PM exercise oversight, because not all developers are alike. Your developers may not accurately represent developers at your target customer. One can easily fall into the trap of assuming that the same pain points that your team experiences......Read More
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
I have a lot of opinions about open-source business models, many of which I am sure are not popular, but let's jump in anyway. :-) First, let's start by acknowledging that there is a basic tension between open-source software (OSS), which is fundamentally socialist, versus our capitalist economic......Read More
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Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 4
"Push back" is a strong term. With developer tools, you can't just discount what your engineering team says out of the gate, since they already have a lot of built-in empathy for the target customer. So listen to them carefully but remember (and also tell them) that they are unlikely to be right ......Read More
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