Awesome Tech Roles

Tech-adjacent Job titles, roles, career paths by role and responsibility in Software and Information Technology ("IT", "ICT", "Tech") organizations, or organization that sees themselves as technology-driven and embraces a product mindset.

This list does not cover non-tech industry enterprises, consulting firms, managed service providers, service delivery firms or startups, as many roles in those (e.g. Architect, Program Manager) have different, often hierarchical or organizational, meaning (e.g. Analyst, Manager, Operations). This list ist not a definition but an observation.

Contents

• Role Overviews.
  • Tech Ladders and other hierarchical progress
  • Tech Roles in a team and lateral progress
  • Career Management
  • Interviews
• Role Descriptions.
  • Product
  • Operations
  • Customer-facing, pre-commit
  • Customer-facing, post-commit

Role Overviews

Not focused on management overall although some links might lead to it. Instead, see for instance Awesome Engineering Team Management.

Tech Ladders and other hierarchical progress

• Creating a career ladder for engineers - Great talk by Marco Rogers comparing different progression frameworks and how to build one on top, with a good focus on diversity (via this long post).
• Designing Engineering organizations - Classic post highlighting different "matrix" ways of organizing tech teams (conclusion: stable, multi-disciplinary, and product-aligned is a good bet).
• Dropbox Career Framework - Dropbox Engineering Career Framework also including SRE, TPM etc.
• Engineering Levels - a case study - Basic high-level overview of individual contributor vs manager vs VP with some nice references e.g. the Cone Model.
• Engineering Levels - a simple framework - Simple list of senior / staff / principal levels with a focus on startups.
• Engineering Levels at Honeycomb - Short blog post explaining Honeycomb's growth framework based on scope and ownership - good reading in the context of this Twitter thread on ladders.
• Engineering manager archetypes and career paths - Charity Majors has a lot of great advice on IC to manager (and back) switch - this is a great summary but sadly behind a weird spam-wall.
• Evolution of Management - ACM research article by Kate Matsudaira on steps from team lead to CxO.
• GitLab Job Families - GitLab's overview of all job families, their whole management framework is openly accessible.
• Importance of Career Laddering - Netlify's career ladder by Sarah Drasner which became career-ladders.dev.
• Irrational Exuberance - Will Larson on career levels on top of designations - good to compare with Finding the right company.
• The real impact of calibration curves - Culture of Engineering Substack on (forced) bell curves used in calibration and the issues with them.
• Jorge Fioranelli's Ladder Framework - A GitHub repo with a complete career management framework along 5 axes.
• levels.fyi - Common attributes of the Engineering career ladder in a standard framework.
• Microsoft Disciplines and Professions - Microsoft's breakdown of their job families into disciplines and professions.
• Navigating the Software Engineering career ladders - A career framework from senior software engineer to VP based on the growth stages of startups.
• On levelling, learning and development - Robbie Clutton comparing engineering levels to Taekwondo dans.
• Operating Well - What I learned at Stripe - Good collection of resources and techniques for management in high-growth organizations, with a particular focus on hiring and scaling.
• Organizational Design - Common team sizes (aka management span of control) for lead roles from Lethain's org growth template and org design template.
• progression.fyi - A great collection of progression frameworks (a much better name for career ladder but less common).
• RtR Engineering Ladder - OG Camille Fournier sharing the Rent-the-Runway Engineering career ladder.
• Scaling an engineering org - John Doran on the changes in roles and responsibilities of engineers when scaling for growith.
• Scaling People Interviews - For the launch of Claire Hughes Johnson's excellent book "Scaling People", interviews from different fields on how to scale teams were published.
• Solving the engineering strategy crisis - What others call an architect role, Will Larson calls Engineering Strategy as a function.
• Spotify Steps Framework - Spotify's Step Framework for career evolution around disciplines and roles.
• Stripe Scaling engineering organizations - Raylene Yung on how to scale Stripe's engineering organization, talking about roles and career paths (here is an Asia-specific post).
• The SWE Job Ladder - Classic article by Chuck Groom on career ladders for SWEs and how it maps to attributes and company principles (aka "follow the money").
• What it really means to be a Manager, Director and VP - Classic blog post from Dave Kellogg in 2015 talking about goals and scope but also giving a good counter-argument against levels.
• Why can't we just all get along - Goldmine of references in a talk by Emily Webber explaining different organizational styles like Discipline Led, Engineering led, Product Led, Data Led, why professional protectionism is a problem and towards her progression framework for a multidisciplinary organization.

Tech Roles in a team and lateral progress

• Accelerate - Summary of the instant classic book by Nicole Forsgren et al. also talking about empowering teams. See below on SPACE and DevEx follow-ups.
• Awesome Engineering Team Management - The Awesome Engineering Team Management list has a section on roles.
• BAPO - Overview of BAPO, Jan Bosch's extension of Conway's Law or "strategy drives structure".
• The Combined Engineering Software Model - Classic blog and podcast excerpt about transforming to agile vertical slice teams explaining some roles like Tester / QA and PUM (Product Unit Manager) along the way.
• Conway's Law and Inverse Conway Maneuver - Good blog post introducing Conway's Law and ThoughtWorks' Inverse Conway Maneuver to avoid having the organization become the product.
• Dead Sea Effect - Bruce Webster coined the Dead Sea Effect for the Tech version of the Peter Principle aka Dilbert Principle.
• Early Stage Startup Handbook - (For comparison) Startups need less defined roles, but this is an interesting overview of roles to be performed.
• Expert Beginner Problem - Erik Dietrich introduced the term "Expert Beginner" for a dead-end in learning progress.
• Freedom at work - Chad Fowler on working towards a career goal like building a startup.
• How engineering-driven leads to engineering-supremacy - Great post by Charity Majors on tech-adjacent roles, balancing engineering and business value focus and respecting sales.
• Is Tech the right career for you? - Quick and easy summary in the HBR blog on non-engineering roles in Tech.
• Jeff Bezos' API Mandate - Back in 2002 Jeff Bezos mandated a service-oriented team architecture at Amazon (the memo was made famous by Steve Yegge) and the "Two pizza team" still referenced today e.g. this recent HBR article on API's between teams.
• Learn Software Development Toolkit - Interview with Mary Poppendieck author of "Leading Lean Software Development" on how Lean may fight against the organization.
• Holocracy Constitution - Holocracy is a management model that tries to avoid caveats of reporting chains (e.g. Conway's law) or Management by Objectives (MBO e.g. OKR) by focusing primarily on very specific, yet dynamic roles and rules. (for comparison).
• Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts - Marianne Bellotti author of "Kill it with Fire" on tech debt, interesting because she put it into context of different engineering team organizations. See also recent research on how tech debt is influences morale.
• Managing with Context, not control - Netflix famous people over process culture defining managers as "glue" (see below).
• Next Generation Organization - Simon Wardley's research on next generation organizations including team structures formed by swarming (also see Adhocracy).
• Picking your next Tech employer - Good overview on various startup stages vs established tech firms.
• Pragmatic Programmer - Notes from a podcast on Andrew Hunt and David Thomas' "The Pragmatic Programmer" especially chapters "Orthogonality" and "Team Division".
• Staff Engineer at Carta - Good overview on the application of Will Larson's and Yonatan Zunger's staff engineer roles at Carta.
• Staff Engineer at Heroku - Amy Unger describing the sphere of influence of a staff engineer helps understand relationships to other roles.
• Staff Engineer - Will Larson's Staff Engineer book and "StaffEng" blog talks about the career towards 4 archetypes of staff engineer roles: Tech Lead, Architect, Solver and Right Hand.
• Startup Engineering Teams - Increment #11 on how to structure teams in startups.
• The Other Kind of Staff Software Engineer - Adam Gordon Bell comparing Line and Staff Software Engineers as similar to IT as Profit Center vs. Cost Center in an example of consulting vs industry companies (see epic fail "IT doesn't matter" essay by Nick Carr but this guide does not focus on traditional industry).
• Team Topologies - Instant classic book that introduced the notions of stream-aligned-, enabling-, subsysteam- and platform-team.
• Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen - Great overview of Product / Eng organizational design, in particular open work, by Elizabeth Ayer.
• The Passionate Programmer - Excerpt from Chad Fowlers "The Passionate Programmer" on long-term career progression and change.
• The uncanny valley of a functional organization - Classic Stratechery piece explaining functional organizations and with that solution verticals as well.
• WTF is a Tech Lead - This list doesn't focus on lead roles but here is a good example of responsibilities within a team of engineers (without the bias of Tech Lead vs Manager).

Career Management

• 2022 Sequoia Compensation Findings Report - The 2022 Compensation Findings Report gives interesting insights into the "Great Resignation", remote work, but also how priorities across departments and roles have changed.
• A16Z 16 Startup Metrics - Classic guide to the most important statrtup metrics - legibility is an important concept when making career decisions and metrics are part of it.
• An Elegant Puzzle - Summary of Will Larson's book "An Elegant Puzzle" especially look at chapter #5.
• Annual Performance Reviews Ruin Everything - Elizabeth Ayer on annual performance reviews and their flaws, in particular when (mis)used as growth feedback.
• Becoming a Technical Leader - Notes and excerpts from Gerald Weinberg's "Becoming a Technical Leader", especially chapters "Obstacles to Effective Organising" and "Learning to Be an Organiser".
• Becoming a VP of Engineering - Part 2 of Emily Nakashima's blog post goes into details of what VPs actually do (part 1 is more how to get there).
• Competency Management - Deloitte / Development Dimensions International white paper on Competency Management using a Success Profile model.
• Compensation as reflection of values - Nice description of how company culture values can shape compensation even in (stealth) startups.
• Developer Progression as a function of navigating complexity - Siddharth Sarda translating Jessica Kerr's research into developer career progression (complexity is a common career framework attribute).
• Don Jones 'Own your Tech Career' - TechLead Podcast episode on Don Jones' book.
• Engineering Leadership Skill Set Overlaps - Paid newsletter, for reference on the terms Staff Engineer, Engineering Manager (EM), Product Manager (PM), Tech Lead Manager (TLM) and Technical Program Manager (TPM).
• Engineering Onboarding Programs - Will Larson gives an overview on how to build up a spin-up training for new engineers and how that feeds into strategyt, goals and roals within the broader team.
• Engineering management 101: evaluating your team's performance - Classic post by Camille Fournier on coaching as core management competency.
• Google's Manager Reseearch - What makes a great manager with research from Project Aristotle (and Oxygen Attributes) from Google re:Work.
• Growth Framework at Medium - Often the term "growth mindset" is used across career dimensions, here is a classic post from Medium who used to publish their ladder tool Snowflake.
• How I set expectations for skip levels - Quick read by Marcus Frödin on how to talk to skip levels differently from your manager, and what they may expect.
• How to prevent a Bozo Explosion - Classic essay by Guy Kawasaki on slow rot and deterioration of innovative company cultures.
• Know how your org works - Another great post by Cindy Sridharan on navigating org incentives in order to influence decisions.
• The 4 key managerial activities - Classic blog post by James Stanier predating many engineering management books focusing on High Output Management with a good example of a day schedule.
• Maker's Schedule - (For historic context) Paul Graham's classic post on manager schedules.
• Measuring Engineering Organizations - Will Larson on what Metrics management and stakeholders care about, important in a time of increasing importance of cash flow impact. It's generally good career advise to relate your own achievements to the company goals.
• Performance Achievements - Technical white paper on the HR system also explaining some ideas of an agile performance appraisal process at Accenture.
• Performance Goals - Performance Management and goals from Clearbit's "The Manager's Handbook".
• Salary Negotiation - Classic (2012) blog post by Patrick McKenzie on salary negotiation although the really interesting core here is your next career move and building up reputation for creating value irrespective of a role title.
• Talent is largely a myth - Long article with good references why talent is largely a myth and how to hire for development.
• The GROW template - The GROW template for structured Career Conversations from Google re:Work.
• Take jobs that make you grow - The "Letters to a new developer" blog has a lot of great posts, this is a good one to balance the benefit of being "glue" (see below).
• The Definition of Senior - In-depth walkthrough of habits required to become a senior engineer, especially a growth mindset and thought leadership.
• The Making of a Manager - Julie Zhuo's "The Making of a Manager" is classic of career and team development - especially self-awareness is good for everyone.
• The Manager's Path - Behind the Code summary of Camille Fournier's instant classic "The Manager's Path".
• Things your manager might not know - Julia Evans on how to talk to your manager.
• Why Shopify Elevated the Non-Manager Career Path and Ditched Meetings - Dual track career paths are more common than this interview makes it sound like but it's an interesting insight into Shopify's management culture.
• Writing the roadmap from engineer to manager - Stack Overflow podcast featuring amongst others Sarah Drasner, author of "Engineering Management for the Rest of Us".
• Zone of Genius - Zone of Genius framework from The Big Leap in Clearbit's "The Manager's Handbook". See also their leveling, and generally self-determination Motivation theory (SDT) and Herzberg's Motivation and Hygiene Factors.

Interviews

• 18F Engineering Hiring Guide - 18F is a technology and design consultancy for the U.S. Government and publishes a lot of their processes including a detailed hiring guide.
• Generalizing Specialists: Improving Your Effectiveness - Classic essay from the agile movement on the Generalizing Specialist approach to skill building a broadening wider than T-Shaped.
• CMU 313 - CMU's course 313 "Foundations of Software Engineering" has a section on "Peopleware", hiring and collaborating as team.
• Coding Homework - Overview on coding "homework" exercises, how to describe them and how to evaluate.
• Common Hiring Manager mistakes - Will Larson on common mistakes and red flags in hiring.
• Competence over Credentials - Separating skills (also known as capacity, competence or capability) from credentials.
• Culture Add - List of potential culture add questions, an important concept in equitable recruiting.
• Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing - Joel Spolsky's classic guide on SWE interviews.
• HBR How to Hire - Research into How to Hire based on mainly Netflix experience.
• Hire for weaknesses - Hiring for weakness and a manifesto for hiring inexperienced engineers.
• Hiring vs Nurturing Managers - Hiring vs Nurturing Managers.
• How to freaking hire great developers - Blog post on Code Reading interviews, their advantage to debias and tips how to conduct them.
• How to Recruit and Onboard Neurodivergent People - Jennifer Riggins introduction to including neurodivergent employees should be recommended reading for everyone and generally accepted hiring best practices.
• Leveling up Job Interviews - Good overview on multiple SWE rounds including soft skills and STAR technique.
• The Hiring Bar - Comparing hiring attributes across various tech firms.
• The Hiring Post - Thomas Ptacek's classic, deep essay about Tech hiring processes.
• Hiring Technical Talent - This article is very high level but GitHub's ReadME is a good overall resource, this is a placeholder to many of their good articles on hiring.
• Interview Performance is kind of arbitrary - Research by Aline Lerner et al on tech interview performance, biases and noise.
• Interview Basics - Interview process from "The Manager's Handbook".
• Interview your manager back - Great Twitter thread on questions to ask back to managers to understand the company and role focus.
• Peopleware - Notes and excerpts from Tom DeMarco's "Peopleware", especially chapters "The Hornblower Factor" and "Hiring a Juggler".
• Resources in Tech Dev Guide - Google's Tech Dev Guide is a great resource for computer science / engineering learning and has a list of (external) resources for taking a tech interview process.
• Questions I'm asking in Interviews - Julia Evans on what to ask as a candidate in interviews.
• Sam's Resume Advice - Sam Greenfield giving some high level recommendations on what to include and how to format resume's / CV's.
• The STAR Interview Method - Blog in the Guardian on the situation, task, action, result (STAR) interview format.
• Six Intersectional Approaches to Improving Your Hiring Process - Advertorial for Byteboard who are building an interesting new interview process, but useful research and references on how to make interviews less exclusionary.
• Everyday storytelling for engineers - based on the STAR interview method, Tony Freed shared his CAO method for interviews.
• System Design Interview Guide - There is many guides and books on system design interviews out there, but this is a good, free overview of required depth.
• Tech Interview Handbook - The Tech Interview Handbook preface also covers variations of engineering roles and has OSS contributions.
• The Most Difficult IT Interview I've Ever Loved - Classic blog post on ThoughtWorks hiring process who early on championed pair programming, code reading and ethics interviews.
• The XYZ Model - The XYZ model used to describe achievements for CV's, Resumes or Career Conversations and Performance Reviews.
• The Science Behind Making Software Engineering Interviews Truly Predictive of Job Performance - Long blog post listing research on biases and advantages of structured interviews.
• The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding - (For comparison) Not directly interview-related, but it's helpful to ask questions about onboarding during interviews to understand learning (growth mindset) focus of an org.
• What we look for in a resume - Chip Huyen explaining what startups look in resume's, especially regarding skills (and how they will be tested).

Role Descriptions

Similar to: Jobs, Designations, Careers paths, Ladders

Trying to cluster similar tech-adjacent roles in terms of roles and responsibilities, without forcing or defining a right or wrong model. Similarity is based on common tech industry use, not purity, think "also known as". As far as possible leaving out levels (e.g. "Senior", "Associate", "Apprentice"), scope (e.g. "Specialist", "Professional", "Strategy"), competency (e.g. "Staff", "Research"), technology (e.g. "Full-stack", "Cloud", "Analytics"), influence (e.g. "Principal", "Architect", "Fellow"), interaction (e.g. "Customer", "Player-Coach"), vanity (e.g. "Executive", "Lead", "Head of") or management responsibility (e.g. "Tech Lead Manager (TLM)", "Director"). Leaving out general corporate functions such as HR, Operations / BizOps, Finance, Marketing / Go-To-Market, Legal and Research / Science.

Product

Designer

Similar to: User Experience (UX) Designer / Engineer / Researcher, Frontend, Interaction Designer / Engineer, Product Designer, Usability, Accessibility, Information Architecture

See also: Product Manager, Technical Writer

• Career Management Document - Jessica Ivins in A List Apart on career progress for designers.
• Design Systems - In UX, design systems have been taken over, in developer advocacy "DX" is coming, this article goes in depth how to apply this to API documentation.
• Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed - Jen Simmons seminal talk on the history of design into the digital era (and why CSS is a programming language).
• Figma Product Design Ladder - Figma's career ladder for product designers shows 6 dimensions or responsibilities like product strategy.
• Guide to UX research - Canonical article trying to explain all aspects of UX research.
• It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks - Heather Buchel's post sounds technical but is actually about the "Web Designer" role, false gendering, equality and equity and user empathy.
• Leading successful product teams - Ariel Salminen's blog is interesting because it equates design systems teams with product teams, interesting aspect to compare to PMs.
• Nurturing Design in Your Software Engineering Culture - Nick Tune on a common design culture in Tech.
• People + AI Guidebook - Google's People + AI Guidebook contains patterns for incorporating AI into product design.
• Product vs. Feature Teams - Marty Cagan on empowered Feature Teams and the role of "Product Designer".
• So you want to be a prompt engineer - Prompt Engineering is a new discipline to engineer generative AI models. Placing this under Design as that's where the article puts it although people argue whether this will be The End of Programming too. See also Brex Prompt Engineering Guide and Microsoft Guidance.
• Staff Design - Staff Design is a catalog and resource to navigate the individual contributor career path, curated by Brian Lovin.
• usability.gov - List of user research techniques as part of the US usability standards e.g. Peter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb.
• USDS Digital Services Playbook - Digital Services Playbook highlighting the focus on Make it simple and intuitive with a reference to the U.S. Web Design System.
• User Experience at Spotify - Interview on product management at Spotify.
• UX Research in Google Design - Google Design has a lot of resources including role descriptions e.g. for UX Research.
• Web Accessibility Blueprint - Beth Raduenzel's classic article why accessibility means empathy for everyone and how to build a team around that.
• What Designers do - Amy Ko's Design Methods compendium starts with the role of the designer and has a list of roles they interact with.
• You got this. - Jeff Zeldman motivating all designers to keep learnings new technologies.

Developer Advocate

Similar to: Evangelist, Developer Relations (DevRel), Developer Experience (DX), Open Source Relations, Product Strategist, Customer Insight, Customer Empathy, Community Ops

See also: Solution Architect, Learning and Enablement, Technical Writer

• A Primer on Developer Marketing - Tom Wentworth on how to create shared sense of purpose in a community.
• Developer Advocacy at Hashicorp - Hashicorp is famous for great developer focus,here are their principles.
• Deploy Empathy - Michelle Hansen's book goes beyond usability research and places customer interviews in the center of product management, support and integration.
• Good Developer Experience - The pillars of good developer experience, including how to build a team.
• How Kelsey Hightower became one of the most respected people in cloud computing - showing Kelsey Hightowers career path through Sys Admin and Engineer to Developer and recently User Empathy Advocate.
• Building a Developer Experience Team - Short blog post in a series of scaling Product Management at SendGrid on how to spin out a developer experience team, what its goals and mission are.
• Demystifying developer advocacy - Classic article by Angie Jonies giving an overview on Developer Advocacy, especially how it compares to other functions like Marketing (via this tweet).
• Don't Call It A Platform - Sam Newman on Platform Engineering and how it's really Developer Enablement and Experience or "Habitability".
• A Guide to Community Operations - Advertorial but well explaining the difference between Community Ops, DevRel and Support.
• So you want to be a developer advocate? - Short post by Tim Spann how their career led to a Developer Advocate role.
• Tactical Guide to kickstarting your community - Long overview by Orbit on their ideas how to use (their) tools to build an OSS community.
• The Developer Advocacy Handbook - Chris Heilmann's Developer Advocacy Handbook has been updated for 11 years and counting.
• The Prosperous Software Consultant - Nader Dabit on the edge between developer advocacy and consulting.
• Taking a DevRel approach to developer onboarding - Sonia John in GitHub's ReadME on how to use ideas from DevRel for onboarding all engineers (nice list of references in the end).
• The radiating circles of Developer Experience Architecture - A philosphical model by Temporal going from Tech Writing to DevOps coving different types of developer community needs.
• Welcome to the Golden Age of Developer Advocacy - Insights from Stripe into DevRel since the pandemic with a lot of links to further resources and people.
• What is a Developer Experience Team - Great overview by Abi Noda comparing the mission statements for DX in many tech firms like Slack, Stripe Google etc.
• What is DX? - Good summary of Developer Experience (DX).
• Why am I a Developer Advocate? - Kelsey Hightower explaining DevRel as the CTO of a product.
• Working in Public - Nadia Eghbal's book "Working in Public" became an instant classic, this is a resource collection of her research, in particular the roles of maintainers in Open-Source projects.

Product Manager (PM)

Similar to: Product Owner, Business Analyst, Requirements Engineer, System Analyst

See also: Program Manager, Developer Advocate, Designer, Product Operations

• A comprehensive survey of Product Management - Very deep research on different PM approaches per company by Lenny Rachitsky.
• Advanced time management principles - Long thread by Shreyas Doshi on priorization for product managers going into different approaches for different experience / seniority levels.
• Alternatives To Product Managers - Marty Cagan drill deep into the difference between product management as a practice and as a role.
• A product managers' guide to API's - Not all products have an interactive UI, good overview on API's as product (see above Jeff Bezos' API Mandate and below Developer Experience).
• Being Glue - Classic essay by Tanya Reilly on enabling collaboration in engineering (see above "Take jobs that make you grow").
• DWP Digital - (For Comparison) Explains the Business Analyst role in a public service / government org.
• Evolution of the Product Manager - Classic ACM research developing a curriculum and competency matrix for different types of PM's.
• GSA TBM Playbook - (For Comparison) Explains how to start Technology Business Management in a traditional org.
• Hashicorp's culture - Chief of Staff Kevin Fishner shows how systems, products and documentation fit together.
• Lessons for Product Leaders - Explaining the PSHE (Problem, Solution, How and Execution) Career management framework for Product Managers.
• Maybe We Should Be Problem Managers - Tongue-in-cheek article about more fine granular PM roles such as Product Planning Manager and Outbound Product Manager (The whole blog is a product management association).
• Most Common Pitfalls of new Product Managers - Nice list for product manager career starters in particular point 1 on the difference to project managers.
• Product Hunt PRD - Product Hunt's simple and concise Product Requirements Document (PRD) is still a high bar.
• Product Management as Discovery - Will Larson's introduction into product management and the problem discovery, problem selection and solution validation loop.
• PM and EM Rules of Engagement - Segment's framework for roles and responsibility split between Product Manager and Engineering Manager.
• Product Manager vs Product Owner - Melissa Perri's classic article tracing the history from business analyst to product manager (also here on her blog in an extended version).
• Agile Product Manager - Comparing Product roles in Atlassian's knowledge base which is naturally biased towards enterprise agile.
• Product Manager - Ken Norton's classic essay defining the product manager.
• Product Management Roadmap in China - Great example in the China Playbook how product management and user focus works in the extremely competitive space in Asia.
• Product Management for Engineers - Increment's latest article on product management from a SWE's perspective.
• Product Managers for the digital world - Context on product manager roles in traditional enterprises aiming for digital transformation.
• Product School - The Product School has a lot of content on hard PM skills like user research, experimentation, measurements, writing PRD's and Product Design.
• Product Shaping at Stripe - Ken Norton's podcast with Michael Siliski comparing Stripe and Google's product approach.
• Project to Product - (For Comparison) Book and approach ("The Flow Framework" blueprint) often used in traditional industry to move from project to product.
• RFC's as decision making tool - Juan Pablo Buriticá on how RFC's can bridge between Engineering and Product and help include everyone.
• The Scrum Product Owner role in one page - (for comparison) Classic definition of the Product Owner role by Roman Pichler, which is a traditional industry IT term.
• Taking Event Support from Sales Tactic to Product Strategy - Classic blog by Paul Young on the blurred line between PM and Marketing e.g. Outbound Product Management.
• Team Leader Venn Diagram - Lara Hogan's seminal Venn Chart of the Who / What and How of Product Manager, Engineering Manager and Engineering Lead.
• Value Proposition Canvas - Part of the Business Model Canvas, how to research and visualize a value proposition.
• Writing Product Specs - Gaurav Oberoi on how long-form writing of product specifications brings clarity.

Product Operations (POps)

Similar to: Product Ops, Product Support, Customer Experience

See also: Program Manager, Support Engineer, Developer Advocate, Customer Success Manager

• Making the Case for Product Operations - Podcast with Denise Tilles in the Product Thinking Blog.
• Product Operations Manager Role - Product School explanation of how Product Ops fits into Product Management e.g. managing the product feedback loop.
• Product Operations Pillars - Blake Bassett's classic reference framework for roles and responsibilities of a Product Operations Team.
• Rise of Product Ops - Product Operations is mentioned below under support, but another option is to see managing user feedback and launches from a product roadmap perspective.
• The Product Culture Shift - Camille Fournier on Product Culture, which does not mention Product Ops but Customer Empathy which is often the focus of Product Operations organizations.
• Voice of Customer Programs - Advertorial but good overview on Voice of the Customer or Customer Insights Programs which sometimes is in Product Operations organizations, other times in Go-to-Market or Customer Success Organizations.

Project Manager

Similar to: Program Manager, Project Portfolio Manager, Technical Program Manager (TPM, TPgM), Consultant, Delivery Manager

See also: Product Manager (PM), Product Operations

• 4 Types of Work in the Phoenix Project - Highly influential, "The Phoenix project" book introduced the 4 types of work model.
• An epic treatise on scheduling - Extremely long classic read on agile project management, bug triage, feature prioritization and dependencies.
• A world-class TPM team - Overview of a modern, well-functioning Technical Program Manager (TPM) function at Doordash.
• The Delivery Manager Role - (For comparision with traditional enterprise) A comparison of the project manager and Delivery Manager role which is often part of complex enterprise agile frameworks such as SAFe where delivery of another piece of business drives tech features.
• Directly Responsible Individuals - Walkthrough of Apple's concept of DRI (Directly Responsible Individuals) which promotes accountability for product and/or project managers.
• Entropy Crushers - Slightly rant-y homage to project managers and the distinction to product managers.
• How to Become a PM - Advertorial Product Manager Career Path Guide but a nice overview from associate to VP of product.
• Larry Page the untold story - History how Google fired all project managers after which chaos ensued.
• PMI Agile Project Management Interview - The Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Professional (PMP) is the most recognized industry certification, in this interview 4 PMP's talk about how the pandemic disrupted project management and turned them to more agile.
• PMO: From Technology Spectator to Enterprise Enabler - Opinion piece on the Project Management Office (PMO)'s changed role .
• Products over Projects - (For comparison) Product vs Project organizations and the strengths of both models.
• Project Management in 2021 - Long blog post on modern project management (advertorial but good references).
• Project Management in Tech - Gergely Orosz summarizing the heterogenous project and product management approaches in big tech firms (see below for follow-up post on TPM).
• Self-organizing teams - (For comparison) aspects of self-organizing teams and how the (project) manager role changes.
• Uber Freight Technology Team - Interview with a whole technology team giving a good overview how program manager, engineer and data science work together - see also "Navigating the TPM team".
• Using Domain-Driven Design for autonomous teams - (For comparison) how bounded contexts can be used to reduce communication overhead between teams.
• What TPMs Do and What Software Engineers Can Learn From Them - Gergely Orosz in his Newsletter specifically on Technical Program Managers (TPM) in the context of his earlier role overview in tech firms.

Technical Writer

Similar to: (Copy) Editor, Tech Writer, UX Writer, Documentation Manager / Designer, Content Strategist, Product Marketing Manager (PMM)

See also: Learning and Enablement, Developer Advocate

• Document Culture at Amazon - Understand how long-form documents enable a shared understanding between DevRel, PM and Technical Writers.
• Documentation as Application - Stripe's Ryan Paul on documentation as interactive content.
• Google Developers Technical Writing Course - Free Course as part of Google's Developer Training on technical writing, check the one on inclusion.
• Leading through Writing - Amy Nguyen's writing tips not only for documentation but beyond that for team updates, casual communication and more.
• Notes on technical writing - List of best practices, not exactly a role description but goes into tasks.
• Product Marketing Manager Tips - (for comparison) Broad role overview of the Product Marketing Manager role which can sometimes overlap with Tech Writers when it comes to external communication of the value proposition and user journey.
• STC - The Society for technical communication defining Technical Communication.
• Technical Writer at Netlify - Technical Writer in Netlify's Career Ladder by Sarah Drasner, author of "Engineering Management for the Rest of Us".
• Technical Writing - Developer Experience Knowledge Base entry on Technical Writing.
• When Life gives you lemons write better error messages - Great blog from Jenni Nadler showing how Tech Writers can be deeply embedded into the feature development process, in this case error messages.
• Who Will Write your Company's Technical Content - Philip Kiely's book and blog are a reference, here an example post on how to split responsibility for writing.
• Write the Docs Interview Guide - Write the Docs is a great resource on technical writing and has a role interview guide.

Software Engineer (SWE)

Similar to: Engineer, Software Developer, Software Development Engineer (SDE), Programmer, Coder, Tech Lead, Product Engineer, Applied Engineering

See also: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

• ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice - The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ethics full version has good ideas on teamwork and career of SWE's.
• OpenAI has always been a bit different - We don't list "AI Engineer" in this list but under "Design" - this podcast episode covers the opposite, applied engineering on top of machine learning research.
• c2 Wiki - (For historic context) Ward Cunningham's original Wiki with a discussion what software engineering means.
• Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards - Hilarious story explaining Software Engineer roles like Mobile Engineer to tech-adjacent roles, in particular AI engineers and Data Scientists.
• Decoding SWE Job Titles - Increment #11, an overview on SWE specific job titles, especially specialization and seniority.
• LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework - LinkedIn open sourced their goal setting both in terms of performance as well as code quality and resilience, that also helps to understand the engineering role scope.
• Growing in ladders of abstraction - An individual's journey towards senior engineer, covers interaction with other practices e.g. testing.
• Roles at Fly.io - Good, short example of a breakdown of various software engineering roles for a startup with examples what they would work on.
• Senior Engineer Skills - Camille Fournier sharing a list of non-technicals skills for engineers expanding their influence.
• Software engineering at large tech-firms - 80,000 Hours is a non-profit with great career advise, this is an older guide on SWE roles in Tech firms specifically .
• Software Engineering related roles - Twitter thread with some nice replies on recent "technical" role titles adjacent to SWE.
• SWEBOK - (For comparison) The IEEE has their "authoritative" definition of software engineering, sadly it's behind a subscription-wall so it's not used in Tech.
• The Art of being full stack - A simple but powerful line, being full stack is a mindset, not a skillset.
• The Product-Minded Software Engineer - Gergely Orosz on the mix between product manager designer and engineer, and healthy curiosity for the business.
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity - Based on DORA research in Accelerate (see above), the SPACE framework builds a model for developer productivity, which is helpful to understand all the aspects of the SWE role. Recently also picked up as Developer Experience, not to mix up with DevEx as DevRel role.
• Useful things about Engineering levels - Charity Majors on levelling and how to level up.
• WayUp Software Engineer Job Guide - Simple introduction explaining main tasks, relationship to other roles and technologies.
• What is Software Engineering? - Introduction to the "Software Engineering at Google" book explaining the role and career of SWE's.
• Who is Product Engineer - Recently the term "Product Engineer" has taken over "Full Stack Engineer" to represent a Software Engineer who applies user-first design principles, often in frontend development.

Quality Assurance (QA)

Similar to: Tester, Test Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Software Developer in Test (SDET)

See also: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

• Agile Testing - Brian Marick signed the Agile Manifesto and defined agile testing after that.
• Exploratory Testing - For historic reference, Cem Kaner's classic definition of exploratory testing.
• How to review as a junior engineer - Code reviews go into explorative testing.
• I test in Prod - Charity Majors in Increment #10 sporting her famous observability manifesto.
• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - As we list prompt engineering under Design, we list finetuning AI models under QA, as it's typically an aspect of AI Engineer work that improves accuracy to a baseline.
• Rethinking Software Testing: Perspectives from the world of Hardware - (For comparison) Opinion piece but good insight for more hardware-focused tech roles.
• QA across the tech industry - Gergely Orosz continuting his series from other roles like data engineer into QA.
• TDD is dead. Long live testing. - For historic reference, famous rant by DHH on TDD.
• Testing Microservices, the sane way - Cindy Sridharan's instant classic overarching framework of testing approaches explaining how QA testers fit in with automation.
• Testing of Microservices - Spotify reshaped the classic Testing Pyramid into the Microservices Testing Honeycomb.
• Two kinds of testing - Nelson Elhage's blog has many pearly on testing, this one talks about fuzzing, regression and integration testing.
• Why observability matters for testers - Interesting perspective from Parveen Khan how SRE and QA can overlap.
• V-Models for Testing - (For comparison) The V-Model is used in traditional industry quality assurance, fittingly presented by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

Operations

Data Analyst

Similar to: Data Scientist, Business Intelligence Analyst, Quantitative Researcher, Operations Analyst, Machine Learning Researcher

See also: Data Engineer, Support Engineer, Trust and Safety Analysts

• Data Analyst Career Path - Advertorial but a good overall overview on data analyst roles.
• Data Analyst Driven Organization - Part of a Google Cloud blog series explaining different roles in different organizations, also has Data Engineering.
• Data Analyst vs Data Science vs ML - Difference between "business" data analyst and data science ("statistician") roles also explaining why ML as technique typically called "engineer".
• Data Science at Twitter - Breaking down data science work alongside insights, pipelines, experimentation and modeling.
• Go-Jek's Data Science Team - Difference between Business and Data Analyst and Data Scientists.
• Google AI Residency - Google's mentoring program for the "next generation of deep learning researchers".
• Interview with Cindi Howson - Interview going through Cindi Howson's career and ideas explaining changes in many role descriptions and a book reference to "Building Analytics Teams".
• The roaring twenties - Twitter thread on modern data analysis tools and how they helped data scientists and analysts step out in the limelight.

Data Engineer

Similar to: Machine Learning Engineer, AI Engineer, Analytics Engineer, Business Intelligence (Intel) Engineer

See also: Data Analyst, Software Engineer (SWE), Integration Engineer, Quality Assurance (QA) when it comes to data quality and AI finetuning

• Business Intelligence Engineers - Advertorial but clear description of a Business Intel Engineer - for comparison with external facing engineers, see also Palantir "Forward Deployed Engineer" below.
• Coding habits for data scientists - ThoughtWorks on the edge between data science and engineering.
• Data as a Product in Data Meshes - Zhamak Dehghani coined the term data mesh and with that also new roles, Data Product Managers and Data Platform Teams and the DataOps Manifesto (see Team Topologies).
• Data First at Grab - Blog from Grab (Steve Yegge their ML ops automation is a competitive advantage) on their Data Engineering SLA's.
• Data Observability - Barr Moses seminal blog post of the cross-section of SRE and Data Engineering - see also Uber's Operational Excellence and Data Quality Effort.
• Data Engineering Past, Present and Future - Advertorial but nice detailed history about different technology stacks since Hadoop that led to the Data Engineer role in its current form.
• Data Science Meets Devops: MLOps with Jupyter, Git, & Kubernetes - MLOps is a new subgenre of data engineering, this blog from Kubeflow shows how GitOps and ML interact.
• Data Science vs Data Engineering - Snowflake's view on data scientists vs data engineers.
• DBT: A new way to transform data and build pipelines at The Telegraph - Data Science was first turned into Data Engineering with Notebooks, then ELT Pipelines defined with tools like, this blog shows why such a path might be chosen.
• Emerging Data Roles: The Analytics Engineer - Was it Michael Kaminsky or Fishtown Analytics who came up with the Analytics Engineer role?.
• Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications - Prompt Engineering (see above) also requires architecturs that are built by data engineers.
• Functional Data Engineering - Maxime Beauchemin, creator of Airflow, in his classic piece that defined functional data engineering.
• How Reporting and Experimentation Fuel Product Innovation at LinkedIn - LinkedIn got famous for data engineering as the birthplace of Kafka and Samza, this old talk gives an overview how the data platform feeds into the product teams.
• Machine Learning Interviews BookMachine Learning Interview - Chip Huyen's book does never clearly explain roles but has good insights on types of teams and companies for ML roles.
• Netflix Data Engineer - Career path of a Data Engineer at Netflix (see also this blog of Netflix roles).
• Planning for AGI and Beyond - This list does not feature "Prompt Engineering" under Data Engineer but below under "Designer", this post is an example by OpenAI on various strategies to approach working with, rather than bulding machine learning systems, in what they call alignment techniques.
• PyTorch builds the future of AI and machine learning at Facebook - Machine Learning Research fused into MLOps over the last years, this is a good history from Facebook how PyTorch emerged (not unsimiliar to TFX at Google).
• Rise of the AI Engineer - Provocative post defining AI engineer closer to Prompt Engineer (which we list under Designer, as it's more about intent than structure).
• There is no Data Engineering roadmap - Deep overview of the various career paths and lateral moves into data engineeering.
• The struggles scaling data teams face - Interesting analysis of growth-limiting factors e.g. sprawl and quality for analytics engineering teams.
• We Don't Need Data Scientists, We Need Data Engineers - Rant, but with a good overview on data roles.
• What is Data Engineering - Collaboration between Benjamin Rogojan and Gergely Orosz, explaining the data engineer role and the differences to data scientist and software engineer.
• Where AI Fits in Engineering Organizations - Short blog by Matt Rickard that shows how hard it is to locate "AI Engineer" between Data Science, DevOps, Prompt Engineering etc.
• Why data scientists shouldn’t need to know Kubernetes - Chip Huyen on how to run machnine learning / analytics systems and how pipeline work and DevOps roles are different from data science and research roles.

Security Engineer

Similar to: Security Analyst, Cybersecurity Analyst, Vulnerability Researcher, Information Security ("InfoSec") Engineer, Threat Intelligence, Hacker, Red Team

See also: Trust and Safety Analyst

• A day in the life of an NCSC vulnerability researcher - (For comparison) Vulnerability Research in public services - UK's national cyber security centre government agency.
• Cloudflare how to build security teams - Very cloudflare-specific but good overview on career paths into security engineering.
• InfoSec Career Path - Twitter thread by Dan Kaminsky on his career in InfoSec.
• InfoSec Competencies - (Technical) Infosec Core Competencies, a good list to understand skills required.
• Introducing Twitter's first algorithmic bias bounty challenge - Twitter has recently stepped up AI Security and Safety with Rumman Chowdhury appointment joining shortly after Peiter "Mudge" Zatko.
• Our CVE Story: An Open-Source, Community-Based Example - (For comparison) How Apache as an OSS Organization became part of the CVE community, in the CVE blog.
• Telegraphing the future of security - Snippets from security experts what future challenges for roles will be e.g. security and digital literacy and user empathy.
• Working at Project Zero - OG Project Zero overview on career paths to security engineering.

Trust and Safety Analyst

Similar to: Fraud Investigator, Policy and Governance, Compliance, Risk Analyst, Incident Response, Content Review, Policy Enforcement

See also: Security Analyst, Data Analyst

• ACFE Scorecard - The US Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has an interesting scorecard / maturity model of fraud processes that also defines role responsibilities within a fraud management team.
• Building a Trust and Safety Mindset - Great history starting with eBay's Trust and Safety Team and overview of all functions in such a team by Adelin Cai.
• Building fairness, trust and safety into machine learning - Interview with Google's Jamila Smith-Loud how AI Principles are part of Trust & Safety.
• How Pinterest fights misinformation, hate speech, and self-harm content with machine learning - Deep dive into Pinterest's Policy Enforcement.
• How to build a Trust and Safety Team - Advertorial from Sift but a good summary on skills and metrics.
• More Content Moderation is Not Always Better - Wired article giving an overview on the complexity of content moderation.
• Resources from the TSPA - Great list of resources on content moderation and more by the Trust & Safety Professional Association.
• Stripe Radar documentation - Stripe's inclusion of human review gives a good insight in payments fraud investigation.
• Twitter Trust and Safety Council - List of organizations informing Twitter's rules and policies.
• Uber's IT Risk Team - Uber Career Blog interview of their Fraud and Risk team.
• Zoom Trust and Safety - Zoom has many security and safety issues in the past, which now made them more open how their Trust & Safety team works.

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Similar to: Reliability Engineer, DevOps / DevSecOps Engineer, System Administrator, Platform Engineer / Team, Infrastructure Engineer, Production Engineer, No Code Operations, Resilience Engineer

See also: Support Engineer, IT Operations, Quality Assurance

• 7 Lessons From 10 Outages - How life really is on-call explained in The Downtime Project's podcast.
• A feedback loop between Dev and Ops - Using documentation (runbooks) to bridge dev and ops teams (see below Technical Writer).
• Are we there yet? - Thoughts on assessing an SRE team's maturity in the Google Blog.
• Building Platform Teams - ThoughtWorks blog on how to build platform teams and what metrics they are measured on.
• Can Resilience Engineering be described in 5 minutes? - Adaptive Capacity Labs conducts deeper post mortem analysis and retrospectives on learning from failures, pitching a role "resilience engineering".
• DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering - Tweet unroll of the difference between Software Development, DevOps, SRE and towards Platform Engineering.
• DORA - The DORA State of DevOps research program which formed the basis for the Accelerate book (see above), especially the practice "Empowering Teams".
• Facebook Configuration Management - (historic context) Classic blog post that open-sourced Chef, written by Production Engineers which would now be called Platform Team.
• Getting into DevOps - ThoughtWorks overview on the history and different styles of DevOps teams including DevNetOps and DevSecOps.
• Google SRE Interview - Niall Murphy and Ben Treynor from Google in an early interview on the SRE practice and comparison to the industry.
• Howie Guide - Jeli.io's Howie Post-Incident Guide described learning from failures and near-misses. It focuses on tech roles but in the Interview section explains connections to tech-adjacent roles, too.
• Incident Operations - The SRE book defines roles during an incident like ops lead, incident commander and communication lead.
• Jez Humble's DevOps insights - For historic context one of the earlier talks by Jez Humble in the New Relic blog.
• Making Ops work more visible - Interesting story from Netflix' DevOps journey from "You run it" to SRE and Platforms teams.
• No Code Operations - Good example of maintenance and operations not only covering Code but all kinds of business processes modelled in all kinds of tools, including No-Code, from Excel to Airtable (for which this is an advertorial).
• Performance Management Maturity Levels - This is actually a list of software performance not career performance points but it contains an interesting section recognizin the need of management buy-in for platform work.
• Platform as a Product - Using Team Topologies (see above) to redefine platforms as valuable products (this could also belong to IT Operations, ongoing discussion on Forrester here).
• Production Engineers at Facebook - Meta's implementation of DevOps and their version of SRE is the "Production Engineer"; the role is explained in the "Seeking SRE" book.
• School of SRE - LinkedIn's SRE onboarding and training material.
• SRE at LinkedIn - Good historic background on how the LinkedIn SRE team evolved very early.
• SRE implements DevOps - OG Seth Vargo and Liz Fong-Jones' legendary blog post and YouTube video series explaining SRE.
• SRE in the real world - Niall Murphy, author of many SRE books, explaining Google SREs the difference to SRE in other orgs and interestingly finding the closest similarity with Staff Engineers.
• Systems design explains the world - Classic Apenwarr post that talks about innovator's dilemma, second-system effect and being glue - basically what in traditional enterprises is referred to as "architect" role but in tech is often SRE and Product Managers.
• The SRE Book - The seminal SRE books by Betsy Beyer et al. freely available - here the link to the introduction "The Sysadmin Approach to Service Management".
• Trunk and Branches Model - Will Larson's learnings scaling infrastructure organizations using his Trunk and Branches Model.
• What does an SRE do - Excellent short overview on the SRE role especially across seniority levels.

IT Operations

Similar to: System Administrator (Sys Admin), Infrastructure Services, IT System Engineer, IT Support Specialist, Technical Staff, Technical Operations (TechOps), ITOps, *Ops, Incident Response, Database Administrator (DBA), Data Center Technician

See also: Support Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

• Dropbox Datacenter automation - Dropbox famously moved large workloads back from AWS into their own datacenter - here are some post-pandemic examples what tasks this meant they had to manage.
• DWP Digital - (For comparison) Explains Infrastructure Services in a public service / government org which is often hardware based e.g. networking.
• Evoling ThoughtWorks internal IT - Nice insight, more from consulting background but applicable to Tech as well.
• Google Data Center Security: 6 Layers Deep - Stephanie Wong's YouTube video won numerous accolades and become the canonical reference for data center DevSecOps.
• How Google and Amazon scale up their huge IT operations - Insight into hyperscalers' economies of scale in data center operations.
• How the data center site selection process works at DropBox - IT operations also covers hardware planning, this is an interesting example from DropBox's Data Center selection process.
• IT Operations (ITOps) Roles & Responsibilities - (For comparision) Traditional non-tech enterprises often use the "ITIL" framework and try to tweak Tech concepts into it by renaming roles e.g. "ITOps".
• Service Management & Operations Management Explained - (For comparison) Depending on the company SRE / DevOps or IT Ops own operations. This is a good overview of classic "ITIL" IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) processes more often found in non-tech enterprises.
• Lean at Amazon - For better or worse, Amazon is known for ruthless operational excellence including writing custom IT operations software (another good example is McDonald's).
• Salesforce Admin - Even SaaS platforms like Salesforce need admins, this is a good overview on the Sys Admin role.
• Thank you, IT - Google's Techstop team is often cited as one of the best perks at Google, an IT that "just works" with great empathy and talent e.g. "Grab and Go Loaners".
• The Changing World of an (Oracle) Database Administrator - (For comparison) Oracle on the "change" of the DBA role.
• Uber's IT Engineering Team - Uber Career Blog interview on their IT Operations team.
• Why a new kind of work means a new role for IT - Dropbox' Work Culture Blog on how IT becomes an enabler and how this changes hierarchies.

Customer-facing, pre-commit

Account Manager (AM)

Similar to: Account Executive (AE), Field Sales Representative (FSR), Account Representative ("Rep"), Commercial Manager, Sales, Business Development (BD), Relationship Manager, Key Account Manager (KAM), Strategic Account Manager (SAM)

See also: Sales Engineer, Technical Account Manager (TAM), Customer Success Manager (CSM)

• Challenger and Sense Making - Example of the countless sales communication methodologies.
• Designing compensation systems for sales professionals - (This deep link does not always work) Broad and deep overview of sales incentive systems, which is important when defining shared goals and objectives.
• How to really motivate salespeople - Business Development incentive (bonus) systems are complex, often commission based. This research gives some insight into the structures behind and helps understand motivations of sales teams.
• Modern Account Management - Explaining the common tasks of account managers in value-driven tech firms.
• Navigating Microsoft - Outsider analysis of Microsoft's rhythm of business (ROB) showing important of acccount managers to understand how others tick.
• Origin of the Business Model Canvas - History of the Business Model Canvas in Strategyzer's blog, one of the modern ways to pitch business models and value propositions and experiment with business ideas.
• Sales Pitch Guide - A guide on the art of the pitch.
• Salesforce State of Sales Report - Modelled after the State of DevOps report, this research survey shows how account management changed post-pandemic.
• Stakeholder Mapping - Stakeholder Mapping and Go-To-Market is one of the most important functions of an Account Manager.
• Talking Sales and Product-Driven Growth - Podcast transcript with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser who shares lessons from building sales teams at Stripe and Google around product-driven growth.
• The Sales Learning Curve - Classic HBR research on different stages of sales processes, important to understand priorities.
• Types of Bonuses - Good summary from Glassdoor showing different incentive structures between sales (pre-commit) and other teams.
• Value Selling in Strategic Accounts - Many pay-as-you-go / consumption businesses look at value selling e.g. with a customer success (CSM) function.

Sales Engineer (SE)

Similar to: Customer Engineer, Principal Architect, Account Strategist, Technical Consultant, Technical Sales, Demo / Spike / PoC Engineer, Solutions Engineer

See also: Technical Account Manager (TAM), Account Manager, Solution Architect, Customer Success Manager (CSM)

• Presales, Sales Engineering and Solution Architects Mean In Today's Digital Sales - Comparing the roles of presales, sales engineers, and solution architects (sadly from a product pitch perspective but it's a good start).
• Sales Engineer Skills - Very sales-y description of sales engineering skills.
• 2022 SE Trends, Creating Connections with Chris White - Advertorial from Navattic but the series has insightful interviews and further resources, especially books and podcasts to learn about the SE Role.
• The confusing job titles in Sales - Good overview from pre- to post-sales titles even including professional servics and field engineering which are sometimes considered part of Sales (most accurately "Go-To-Market" or "Customer Success" organizations).
• The SaaS Org Chart - (For comparison) David Sacks showing 3 very detailed sample org charts for Series A, Series B, or Series C with a strong focus on Customer Success.
• Value Selling vs Solution Selling - Good comparison of Account Manager role, often value selling, and Sales Engineer role, often solution selling.
• What is Tech Sales? - Advertorial but refreshingly honest article about the career as "technology salesperson".
• Why top SaaS sales teams are creating a new role, Demo Engineers - Example of a twist on the SE role, Demo Engineer, especially for No-Code and SaaS companies where the focus lies more on Proof-of-Concept work.

Solution Architect (SA)

Similar to: Solutions Architect, Solution Sales, Solution Planner, Technology Architect, Technical Architect, Enterprise Architect, Office of the CTO (OCTO), Evangelist, Customer Advocacy

See also: Sales Engineer (SE), Technical Account Manager (TAM)

• Accenture Career Blog - (For comparison) Explaining the Technology Architect role for Consulting / Service Provider / Service Delivery firms which usually focuses on projects, not products.
• Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery - Charity Majors' excellent summary of a mega thread of Twitter shows why this list as well does not include a separate Architect role, because it should be a function within a role or rotation. She does however explicitly exclude SA, as advisory is generally something good.
• Awesome Software Architecture - Awesome list of general software architecture resources which (sadly) is mostly not connected to the term "architect".
• Databricks Economic Benefits - Advertorial but a good example how many product / platform companies move up the value chain to management consulting e.g. Databricks with their Resident Solution Architect which is more similar to a TAM or CSM.
• The daily life of field CTO - Senior SAs are sometimes called Office of the CTO or Field CTO - blog by Kai Waehner on that role.
• The different types of Software Architects - (For comparison) while this addresses primarily traditional enterprise concerns who use the C4 model, it is a handy guide to distinguish the Solution Architect in Tech from these.
• GitHub OCTO - GitHub's research unit is responsible to syndicate their view of the future of technology.
• How Google's Office of the CTO is Redefining Collaboration - Podcast with Google Cloud's OCTO with the history and future of the team.
• How we close deals and keep customers happy with Slack Connect - Slack's Technical Architects are part of the Sales Customer Success (CSM) organization but guide the implementation, like Deployment Engineers.
• Problems with Solution Selling - Account managers are usually value or challenger selling because solution and product selling is more complex which makes commercials harder.
• SAP Solution Blog - (For comparision) Explaining Solution Architects for ISV / SaaS solution providers, focused on long-term system design while customers and consultants customize their product.
• The role of customer advocacy in sales and support - Industry-group overview of customer advocacy as a role between marketing and sales, often performed by industry (as oposted to solution/technical focus) SAs.
• Solution Architect — Who Am I? - Solution Archicture is a term used very differently in industry (Enterprise Architecture), Services Delivery / Professional Services / System Integration (Project Scoping / Planning) and SaaS / Consumption business / pay-as-you-go - this explains the latter and explains the career path.
• Solution Architect in SAFe - Written from an enterprise point of view (SAFe) but creating, defining and communicating a shared technical and architectural vision also applies to the pre-commit stage of a customer "solution" aka "project".
• The Solution Architect's Guide to Serverless - Example of considerations that Solution Architects might consider, serverless is a good example because it leans towards business "solutions".
• Why is it great to be a Consultant - (For comparison) often solution architecture is performed as review by external consultants - here are some advantages of this approach. See also "So you want to be an IT Consultant?" for historic comparison.

Customer-facing, post-commit

Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Similar to: Account Manager, Enterprise Services Manager (ESM), Account Strategist, Customer Experience, Customer Advocacy

See also: Account Manager, Technical Account Manager (TAM), Support Engineer

• Aligning customer success - ServiceNow's Emma Bilardi in an interview on alignement of CSMs with account management and professional services teams and more.
• Customer Success 2.0 - McKinsey strategy piece showing the history of the Customer Success function as part of Customer Experience instead of Business Development (see above).
• Engineering Customer Success - Part of the Product-Led Growth concept, this blog introduces how to measure customer success as driver of startup feature build and market fit.
• Effective CSM teams - Interview with experts who perform(ed) TAM and CSM roles.
• Forrester Business Case For Customer Success Management - Forrester and Salesforce have a good case study for the introduction of a Customer Success function.
• How is Value Engineering different - In sales-focused CSM teams "value engineering" is a commonly applied practice, sometimes even "Value Engineer" roles, to develop (SaaS) pricing and ROI models.
• How to Design a Sales to CSM Handoff That Works - Very high-level / sales-y article but focusing on the handoff useful to understand the difference between Account Manager and CSM roles.
• Microsoft Customer Success Journey - Microsoft champions the Customer Success function from a sales perspective (TAM perspective see below).
• The evolution of Customer Success - Historic overview of the Customer Success Role by Catherine Blackmore (in an advertorial podcast).

Integration Engineer / Consultant

Similar to: Deployment Engineer / Strategist, Migration Engineer, Field Engineer, Professional Services, Delivery Architect, Technology Architect, (Customer) Solution(s) Engineer, Implementation Services, Implementation Consultant, System Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE), Client Services Engineer

See also: Solution Architect, Partner Engineer

• Cloud migration for the real world - Cloud / GCP specific (AWS here) blog but shows how professional services teams build up standard methodologies between pre-commit and post-commit teams, customers and partners.
• Databricks Labs - Databricks uses the role "Field Engineer" in their "Labs" for a combination of Integration Engineer and DevRel, also building / maintaining some open-source reusable helper tools coming out of customer engagements (here is a similar repository from Google Cloud).
• Data for the Win - Data and analytics companies like Tableau often have the strongest solution engineering value proposition and they can combine tooling with business knowledge to create models.
• Deployment Engineer - (for comparison) Traditionally the term "Deployment Engineer" has been used for someone responsible to bring a release or product to production, hence often used for consultants. It was followed by "Field Engineer" and more recently "Integration Engineer".
• Facebook's Solutions Engineering Team - Long interview about the practical role details at Meta's Solutions Engineering Team which a mix of Solution Architect and Integration Engineer (at Google they are called Customer Solution Engineer in gTech).
• Forward Deployed Software Engineer at Palantir - Interesting, weirdly militaristic, title for "embedded" integration engineers at Palantir, similar to Databricks' Resident Architects. Their Consultants are called Deployment Strategist.
• GitLab Migration Engineer - GitLab's Professional Services is under its Customer Success org and focuses on certifying service partners (see "Partner Engineer") with their standard methodology (see below).
• Hashicorp introducing Professional Services - Interesting insight how small but famous tech companies take a step towards Implementation Services.
• HBR Digital Transformation - (For comparison) Digital Transformation ("Every company wants to be a tech company" aka "Software is easting the world") is the main trend tech companies plug into, this older Harvard Business Review article gives a good overview.
• How to become a Premier Field Engineer - The term "Field Engineer" has fallen a little bit out of session but generally used to mean customer-facing engineers travelling on-site.
• Red Hat Consulting Offering - Red Hat is very open about the structure of their consulting engagements which gives a good overview of the tasks of an architect.
• Scalable and seamless customer service - Advertorial but good example of business-focused consulting services as done by Salesforce.
• Solution Engineering done right - Twitter thread by Claire Vo on what make successful Solution Engineers, including alignment to Eng or GTM, roles and responsibilities and what it means to build for customers.
• So you want to be an IT Consultant? - (For historic comparison) Classic ThoughtWorks blog from 2014 explaining how consulting organizations work e.g. staff augmentation vs solution-based (see "The Other Kind of Staff Software Engineer" above).
• The 12 Worst Differentiators for Professional Services Firms - Pop-up laden advertorial but good insights what to look for in professional services value propositions (which drives what the roles do).
• Why Doesn't Anyone Talk About Microsoft Consulting Services - Good historic insight into the long-term struggle to find the right balance at Microsoft between Partners and Microsoft Cross Industry Solutions / Consulting Services (XIS / MCS).

Partner Engineer

Similar to: Partnership Manager, Alliance Manager, Partner Development Manager (PDM), Partner Solution Architect, Partner Solution Engineer, Partner Support, System Engineer, Deployment Engineer, Field Engineer

See also: Learning and Enablement, Developer Advocate (DevRel), Integration Engineer

• AWS Teams you NEED to Know to Accelerate Business Growth - Interesting perspective into AWS's partner organization and how Independent Software Vendor (ISV) SaaS work on AWS Marketplace.
• Building the MotherDuck Partner Ecosystem - Great example from a startup, DuckDBs parent company, building up their go-to-market and delivery partners.
• Cisco's Customer Experience Framework - Cisco's services portfolio around Expert Resources, Trusted Support, Insights and Analytics and Contextual Learning for their partners.
• Confluent verified integrations program - Often tech companies certify their software to run on other platforms or be operated by partners, another good example of a partner engineer's role.
• Elastic Partner Program - (For comparison) Elastic relies a lot on partners (less with AWS but more with GCP and Azure) so their PDF guides do a good explaining the difference between Managed Service Provider (MSP), Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), System Integrator (SI) and Resell partners.
• Facebook's Partner Engineering Team - Facebooks careers topic page on partner engineering.
• Finding The Right Fit at LinkedIn - Lyn Muldrow on the LinkedIn blog on the career from SWE to Partner Engineer.
• Senior Partner Engineer at Slack - Interview with Slack's Brook Shelley on Meghan Duffy's Tech Role Models blog.

Managed Services

Similar to: Business-critical services, Customer IT Operations, Service Delivery, Client Technical Solutions, Professional, Specialist, Outsourcing

• Accenture Infrastructure Services - Accenture (consulting firm, not strictly Tech) explaining capabilities it offers to customers to manage their cloud e.g. FinOps.
• Azure Expert MSP - Microsoft Azure has one of the most mature managed services partners programs.
• Cisco Partner Managed Services - Cisco pivoted from hardware into services but smarter than IBM with a managed services strategy that included partners.
• Huawei's Own Digital Transformation - (For comparison) Network Managed Services are especially prevalent in outsourcing-heavy Telecommunications (Telco) firms, a view inside Huawei's Service-Delivery Platform shows how everything centers around tracking managed services and resource allocation.
• IBM spins of Kyndryl - Over the years, IBM had become a managed services business and now spun it off.
• Palo Alto - Many companies move to SaaS by offering their product in the Cloud including managed services, for instance Palo Alto offers managed security services.

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

Similar to: Enterprise Services Manager (ESM), Account Strategist, Customer Experience, Service Account Manager / Support Account Manager (SAM), Customer Success Engineer

See also: Account Manager (AM), Solution Architect (SA), Customer Success Manager (CSM)

• A day in the life of a TAM at Microsoft - Good read for comparison of TAM between more technical and more business (customer success) focused, at Microsoft CSM are in the Business Development org.
• A day in the life of a TAM at Red Hat - See below for Red Hat's difference between TAM, CSM and Support.
• Gitlab TAM Handbook - GitLab's open source TAM handbook as part of the customer success team.
• Red Hat's Tenets of TAM - Five tenets of good technical account management, with the difference between TAM, Support and CSM from a Red Hat perspective.
• TAM at Percone - (For comparison) A smaller Tech company where TAM covers more breadth towards support and solution architecture.
• VMWare TAM to the Rescue - The VMWare Careers blog has a lot of interesting stories about their support roles, this one is an example of a TAMs daily work.
• What it is like to be a Technical Account Manager in AWS? - Deep introduction including career path of a TAM as part of the AWS Premium Support offering.

Learning and Enablement

Similar to: Practice Lead, Instructor, Coach, Moderator, Facilitator, Trainer, Instructional Designer, Customer Education, Technical Enablement, Field Enablement

See also: Partner Engineer, Technical Writer, Developer Advocate (DevRel)

• Communities of Practice - Emily Webber's classic article introducing the roles in internal communities of practices and how trainers own organizational development.
• Customer Education - Advertorial but a good list of priorities in a customer education / learning and enablement team.
• Design Sprint - The Design Sprint Methodology is a mix of Design Thinking and Lean and collaborates across roles often facilitated by a coach.
• Distributed Education - Advertorial but good background on challenges for educators post-pandemic.
• Field Enablement at GitLab - GitLabs field enablement role is interesting because it's very broad, containing parts of marketing, strategic ops (StratOps) and culture.
• Glitch Interview - Interview with a Developer Advocate how they used Glitch to facilitate easy web coding classes.
• Pitfalls to Avoid When Building a CCoE - AWS blog post on how to build up a cloud center of excellence (or any center of excellence).
• Remote Education - GitHub Blog Series on best practices for online campus communities.
• The Who What How and Why of Sales Enablement - Classic Gartner article that defines the pillars of the Sales Enablement function.
• Stop sidelining your network team - Advertorial by A Cloud Guru (now part of PluralSight) showing the need for re-skilling due to technology changes, here with the example of network infrastructure to Cloud.
• The Programmer's Brain - The Programmer's Brain is a bug summarizing tons of Felienne Hermans's research on learning, understanding and collaboration for engineers.
• Trainer at SAP - Explaining the trainer role at SAP, long time known to have a huge industry-specific education organization.

Support Engineer

Similar to: Support Operations, Technical Solution Engineer (TSE), Technical Support Engineer (TSE), Product Technology Manager, Technical Product Expert (TPE), Incident Response, Support Escalation Engineer, L2 / L3 Engineer

See also: Data Analyst, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Technical Account Manager (TAM), Customer Success Manager (CSM), Product Operations

• A day in the lift of an AWS Developer Support Engineer - Support description that in 2010 was 10 years ahead and therefore still relevant - for historical reference in particular the career where Jeff Barr ended up (Chief Evangelist for AWS).
• Big Tech and the reality of scaling customer support - Scoop by Gergely Orosz going deep into the (good and bad) incentives for support organizations.
• Customer Experience at Apple - Very long interview with Jon Sculley how apple sees the end-to-end customer experience, made famous with the Genius bar.
• Customer Happiness at Canva - Canva is one of the companies who turned their support team goals inside out by making it the center of "Customer Happiness" (see also Customer Experience)
• Customer Service at Shopify - Whole framework of how to build successful customer service and retain happy customers (interesting context in the same blog on Apple above).
• Customer Support vs Customer Success Explained - Advertorial but good description of the flavours of customer support, clearly separating customer success and its various variants.
• 2022 Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report - Advertorial Podcast but interesting overview panel of different companies, showing what goals and metrics (e.g. CSAT) drive support teams and Support as "career incubator".
• Design for Support Teams - Actually a usability design post but explains well the needs of support teams.
• Developing supportability for a public cloud - Example how Infrastructure Teams (SRE and CRE) can influence Support Team Roles and Responsibilities by optimizing metrics such as Supportability (see also "Deemed SLI").
• Dropbox Support Team - Specific to Dropbox but good insight into metrics, tasks and technology of support teams.
• From IT Certificate completers to Googlers - Career paths into tech via support roles, resident programs and certifications.
• Google CRE - Google's Customer Reliability Engineering team are SREs working towards shared operational fate between Google and Google Cloud Platform customers.
• Great Incident Management - Humerous but good overview on more detailed incident management and outage communcation roles.
• Microsoft Support Escalation Engineer - Twitter thread around the Escalation Engineer role at Microsoft (that is only described in a PDF otherwise) and what other titles for Level 2 or 3 Support Escalation roles exist.
• On adaptive capacity in incident response - Increment #16 on reliability has some good articles on incident management.
• On-call at any size - Increment #1 focused on on-call, this article compares the (DevOps) models at different org sizes.
• Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards - (For comparison) SCP is rarely used in tech firms but the breakdown can understand traditional industries.
• We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation - Rotations are an underutilized tool to build customer empathy - Etsy has used support rotations for everyone in the company since 2010.
• What is a Support Account Manager - VMWare explaining their version of the Support Account Manager in Global Support - which in other firms may be similar to TAM, alongside a TAM, or alongside a CSM depending on the org setup.
• Zappos CLT - How Zappos Customer Loyalty Team is empowered to help.
• Zendesk's Support Metrics - Advertorial but deep explanation of support metrics shows priorities of support work.