The Sitecore Developer Experience

It's been over a year now since I joined Sitecore, and in that first year as a Platform Architect I had the privilege of spending most of my time working on Sitecore JavaScript Services, learning some new technologies and helping shape the future of Sitecore development for JavaScript. Though working on JSS has been one of the highlights of my career, I'm excited to announce that I'm now taking on a new role at Sitecore, as Technical Product Manager for Developer Experience.

In my new role, my primary responsibility is ensuring that creating Sitecore-based solutions is a delight for software developers. Directly, this means developer tooling, standards (Helix), and reference implementations (Habitat). Indirectly, it's my job to be the advocate for the developer across the platform. Our tools and APIs should make it easier for you to do your job and create value for your organization or customer, not harder.

Much credit goes to Thomas Eldblom for pioneering this role, and obviously for establishing the much needed Sitecore standards and reference in Helix and Habitat. It's a great foundation to build on.

At Active Commerce, product management was part of my role as CTO. I enjoyed the ability to shape the product, spec out features, and prioritize our efforts. But the organization was small enough that I could still own a feature or two myself, and write some code. I know I wouldn't really be happy in my work without that. Sitecore is a much larger organization, where coding and product management don't often coexist. So a very appealing aspect of this role for me is that to serve Sitecore developers, I need to be one -- and stay one. Having worked as both a solution partner and a technology partner, I've spent a lot of years working with the platform, but as it evolves, I'll need to stay current and remain a "power user" of the developer features and APIs. My install of Visual Studio (and VSCode) isn't going anywhere.

But writing code myself is not enough. The Sitecore developer community is smart and passionate. You're out implementing large, diverse solutions with our platform, often using it in ways we didn't even conceive of. I want to know what you love and loathe in the process of creating those solutions. And that's the other great part of my new role -- staying close to and involved with the Sitecore community that I've been part of for the last 10 years. Y'all are great, I look forward to hearing from you and helping to address your needs. I'll be working on a means of opening up our Developer UserVoice to more of you, and I obviously look forward to many conversations at Symposium this fall!

-Nick