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
- Owned the multi-quarter technical product strategy for the API governance and collaboration platform across 4 engineering teams (32 engineers), leading multi-quarter vision and platform strategy, API and SDK roadmap ownership, and architecture-decision facilitation for 430K monthly active API developers.
- Ran the API and SDK product ownership workstream using OpenAPI spec reviews on every endpoint, semantic versioning and 12-month deprecation policy, and SDK ergonomics audits in Python, TypeScript, and Go, shipping 58 new endpoints across 7 services and cutting time-to-first-call from 17 min to 5 min.
- Drove architecture trade-off facilitation with latency, scale, and cost framing on every RFC, weekly architecture-review forum with staff engineers, and written decision memos with options and recommendation, reviewing 46 RFCs across 4 service teams and cutting decision turnaround from 3.5 weeks to 6 days.
- Built the roadmap and prioritization for technical investments through RICE + cost-of-delay scoring for platform epics, quarterly capacity split across DX, scale, and tech debt, and opportunity-sizing memos before every commit, holding capacity at 60% customer features, 25% platform scale, 15% deprecated-API migration.
- Owned PRD, API spec, and RFC authoring using 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 / 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, delivering 38% drop in p99 API latency and 22% lift in monthly active developers across 4 quarters.
- Led multi-team technical program leadership with weekly cross-team syncs with Platform, Data, and Security PMs, shared dependency board across squads in Jira, and written program updates to engineering leadership every 2 weeks, driving 6 multi-team programs across 11 partner teams at 91% on-time program completion.
- Ran the developer and technical-user research program covering 48 customer interviews and 8 dogfooding cohorts across 18 months, using 60-minute interviews with backend engineers, SREs, and architects, monthly review of GitHub issues, support tickets, and Slack channels, and quarterly developer survey to 6,000 active users.
- 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 webinar series and conference talks with technical marketing, delivering 4 GA launches with 30% lift in week-1 SDK installs and zero P0 docs regressions.
- Owned the beta-to-GA lifecycle and deprecation program using 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, delivering 3 APIs deprecated with 100% partner migration and zero escalations to support.
- Worked closely with Engineering, Platform, Data, Security, and Developer Relations teams to coordinate API design review cadence across 3 service teams, cross-service deprecation calendar and partner comms, and quarterly RFC-review forum, authoring 7 technical-product playbooks (API review, deprecation, beta-to-GA) that shaped the team's standard playbook and mentoring 2 incoming Technical PMs through their first platform rotations.