Taking the plunge: from program manager to developer advocate
About a year ago, I had an epiphany: this “cloud technology” thing was not slowing down. In fact, it was speeding up exponentially. At that time, I was a program manager on the developer relations team for Google Cloud and was responsible for putting scalable processes into place to help our team become more efficient and effective. But even after several years under my belt as a PgM at Google, I felt like a fish out of water (cue lots of flopping around). I had never worked in a space so fast to grow and quick to change. They way that I was working (in email, in spreadsheets, and in manual tasks) was no longer cutting it.
My first attempt to fix the problem was to take a vacation beyond the reaches of mobile service. Pro tip: that actually works pretty well! But when I returned, I came up with a real solution. After two years of watching developer advocates on my team learning about Google Cloud Platform and sharing what it can do with developers around the world, I decided it was about time to do it myself. I had seen them use GCP to build tools to help them in their own roles, automating mundane tasks and building actual databases. This was exactly what I needed!
I had a hunch that these products weren’t just for developers. As a PgM, I had been exposed to a many of them and at least my big toe had dipped into BigQuery (at Google it’s where we keep our data, after all). So that’s when I decided to get started. I was going to figure out what was within reach for those of us without a computer science degree. My toolbox, while not empty (email and spreadsheets are powerful tools!), was about to get some new loot.
Well, it turns out pivoting to a new role was more valuable and energizing than I could have imagined! By having the space to focus on learning, I was able to write my first technical blog post, present a technical session at Google Cloud NEXT, and speak for Trello Day at Atlassian Summit Europe.
I want to share with you how I got started, what I chose to learn, and how I learned it (and continue to learn it!). I’ll be blogging about these topics and more here on Medium, hoping to pay it forward as a thank you to all that have supported and inspired me along the way!
