Show Notes
Ever wondered what a technical product manager actually does – and why every modern tech org seems to want one? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will is joined by Leon Belobrov and Alex Stewart-James to unpack how SEEK builds platform products that power everything from candidate apps to internal tooling – and what it means to be a PM for APIs instead of UIs.
This episode's special guests: Leon Belobrov (SEEK Principal Product Manager, Platform) and Alex Stewart-James (SEEK Snr Technical Product Manager)
They break down what makes TPMs a bit of a “unicorn role” – blending deep product thinking with enough technical context to serve engineers as their primary customers – and why internal platforms, APIs and deployment pipelines are becoming just as important as customer-facing apps. You’ll hear how SEEK uses jobs-to-be-done research with engineers, metrics like time-to-10th PR, and platform reliability/security KPIs to prioritise what gets built – and what gets cut.
In this episode you’ll learn: • The real difference between a “regular” PM and a TPM – including why serving engineers, focusing on APIs and reusable capabilities, and obsessing over platform reliability changes how you think about product. • How SEEK discovers what engineers actually need – from interviewing 25+ engineers across the business to mapping their pain points into jobs-to-be-done and opportunity scores, instead of just building what the loudest voice wants. • Practical advice if you want to move into TPM or work better with platforms – including dogfooding, avoiding over-engineering, and remembering that “you are not your customer” even when you’re an engineer building for engineers.
If you’re a software engineer, platform/DevOps engineer, BA, product manager or IT leader curious about platform teams, internal products and where technical PMs fit into modern tech orgs, this episode gives you a front-row view into how SEEK does it – and how you might shape a similar path.
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