Julian's Journey from Hardware Engineer to Sr. Director of Product Management (GitHub)

In today's episode, we have Julian Dunn, Director of Product Management at GitHub for GitHub Actions. Prior to his role at GitHub, Julian worked as the Director of Product Marketing for incident response at PagerDuty, where he honed his skills in the industry. Julian's extensive experience in the tech industry also includes his work at Chef Software, where he held various engineering and product roles, working on products such as Habitat, Chef Automate, InSpec, and Chef Infra. Julian started his career at Chef as a post-sales field engineer, where he gained valuable experience and knowledge of the industry. Additionally, Julian has worked on cloud infrastructure automation and operations for SecondMarket, a New York-based alternative markets startup that was eventually acquired by NASDAQ Private Market. Before that, he spent nearly a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he managed all content delivery, publishing, and streaming media systems for CBC.ca, the largest media website in Canada. Follow Culture of Code ➡️ Twitter - https://twitter.com/FelixThea ➡️ Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/culture-of-code-podcast/id1563271780 ➡️ Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0fqIsZcqFeB6NTdKaHSJtP Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:43 What is GitHub Actions 03:22 How GitHub has been integrated with Microsoft after being acquired by the company a few years ago. 05:26 Julian's diverse background in engineering, DevOps, and product management, and when is the right time to shift careers 08:55 Starting a product management department from scratch and how being a generalist led to new opportunities. 11:18 The importance of company size when it comes to career opportunities and how self-awareness is crucial in recognizing when it's time to switch things up. 14:06 Julian gives advice on seeking out opportunities and vouching for oneself in order to get chosen for new roles. 16:41 The differences between product management and product marketing 20:38 The engineering perspective on product management and how he started the product management department at Chef. 23:28 Julian's advice on establishing a product management function within a company and talks about the blurry boundaries of the role.