Niko Kessler Senior Technical Product Manager
San Francisco, CA • niko.kessler@gmail.com • +1 415-555-0173
Profile Summary
- Senior Technical Product Manager with 8 years of experience operating in developer-platform and API product organizations across developer tools, B2B SaaS, and data infrastructure, specializing in API contract design, RFC authoring, and architecture trade-off facilitation.
- Solid background across API surfaces (REST, GraphQL), SDK languages (Python, TypeScript), orchestration (Kubernetes, Kafka), observability (Datadog, Amplitude), and experimentation (LaunchDarkly, Confluence) with strong fundamentals in PRD and RFC authoring, opportunity sizing, and SLO-driven prioritization.
- Deep expertise in API contract design, architecture trade-off facilitation, RFC and design-doc authoring, and lifecycle and deprecation management, leveraging methodologies such as versioning and deprecation policy and latency / error-budget driven prioritization to drive well-scoped, well-instrumented technical-product delivery.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Engineering, Platform, Data, Security, and Developer Relations teams in multi-team technical-product environments, contributing to architecture reviews, RFC forums, and developer-research cycles with a technically-grounded, evidence-first mindset.
- Emerging leader who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of data-driven trade-off rigor and developer-experience discipline through API-design office hours and RFC-review forums, while leading API design council and RFC-review forum and authoring widely adopted PRD, API-spec, and deprecation templates; holds Pragmatic Institute PMC-III and AWS Cloud Practitioner.
Technical Skills
- APIs & Platform Surfaces:
- REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, webhooks, OpenAPI / AsyncAPI specs, versioning and deprecation policy, rate-limiting and quota design
- SDKs & Developer Surfaces:
- Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, CLI design, SDK ergonomics, sample code, migration guides, developer docs reviews
- Platform & Infra Familiarity:
- Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Kafka, Postgres, Redis, multi-region trade-offs, capacity planning, cost-per-request modeling
- Observability & Telemetry:
- Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, p95 / p99 latency, error budgets, SLOs, distributed tracing literacy
- Product Analytics & Experimentation:
- Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog, LaunchDarkly, Split, A/B tests, holdouts, cohort analysis, adoption funnels
- Data Literacy & Quant Skills:
- SQL (intermediate to advanced), Python notebooks for analysis, dashboarding (Looker, Mode), opportunity sizing, unit economics
- Certifications & Methods:
- Pragmatic Institute PMC-III, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Reforge Technical Strategy, CKAD (in progress)
- Specifications & Communication:
- PRDs, API specs, RFCs, design docs, executive readouts, partner-facing release notes, developer-relations launch coordination
Education
Work Experience
- Set the multi-quarter technical product strategy for the API governance and collaboration platform across 4 engineering teams, leading platform vision, API and SDK roadmap, and architecture-decision facilitation for 430K monthly active API developers.
- Ran API and SDK product ownership through OpenAPI spec reviews on every endpoint, semantic versioning with a 12-month deprecation policy, and SDK ergonomics audits in Python, TypeScript, and Go, shipping 58 new endpoints and cutting time-to-first-call from 17 min to 5 min.
- Facilitated architecture trade-offs with latency, scale, and cost framing on every RFC, a weekly architecture-review forum with staff engineers, and written decision memos with options and recommendation, reviewing 46 RFCs and cutting decision turnaround from 3.5 weeks to 6 days.
- Built the quarterly roadmap for technical investments through RICE plus cost-of-delay scoring on platform epics, capacity splits across DX, scale, and tech debt, and opportunity-sizing memos before every commit, holding capacity at 60 / 25 / 15 across customer features, platform scale, and deprecated-API migration over 14 platform epics.
- Owned PRD, API spec, and RFC authoring through PRDs that pair customer framing with measurable acceptance, API specs in OpenAPI with reviewable diffs in GitHub, and RFC templates capturing options, trade-offs, and rollout plan, lifting spec accept-on-first-review from 42% to 86%.
- Drove telemetry-driven prioritization through p95 and p99 latency, error rates, and adoption funnels in Datadog and Amplitude, SLO budgets that gate new feature work, and cost-per-request modeling tied to pricing decisions, cutting p99 API latency by 38% and lifting monthly active developers by 22%.
- Led multi-team technical programs through weekly cross-team syncs with Platform, Data, and Security PMs, a shared dependency board across squads in Jira, and written program updates to engineering leadership every two weeks, driving 6 multi-team programs at 91% on-time completion.
- Ran the developer and technical-user research program through 60-minute interviews with backend engineers, SREs, and architects, monthly review of GitHub issues, support tickets, and Slack channels, and a quarterly developer survey to 6,000 active users, covering 48 customer interviews.
- Owned technical launch and developer enablement through developer-relations partnership on docs, sample code, and migration guides, usage-based pricing pages co-built with sales engineering, and a webinar series with technical marketing, delivering 4 GA launches and lifting week-1 SDK installs by 30%.
- Ran the beta-to-GA lifecycle and deprecation program through closed-beta cohorts with weekly feedback cycles, GA criteria tied to SLO budgets and adoption thresholds, and 12-month sunset plans with migration paths for breaking changes, deprecating 3 APIs with 100% partner migration.
- Worked closely with Engineering, Platform, Data, Security, and Developer Relations to coordinate API design review cadence, cross-service deprecation calendar, and a quarterly RFC-review forum, authoring 7 technical-product playbooks that shaped the team's standard playbook and mentoring 2 incoming Technical PMs through their first platform rotations.