02 / Technical product management
IBM
Defined Enterprise Edition for Db2 developers. Leadership approved it for general availability in 1Q27.
- ApprovedBusiness case
- 1Q27GA locked
- $20MOpportunity sized
The challenge
Enterprise developer tools serve people with specific workflows inside organizations with demanding requirements: security, governance, diagnostics and integration. A tool individual developers like can still fall short for the larger teams that depend on it.
I was asked to make the product and business case for an Enterprise Edition of the IBM Db2 for z/OS Developer Extension, one of more than 15 extensions in the initiative. The question was what combination of capabilities, packaging and positioning would justify a distinct offering.
My role
I owned the 0→1 definition of Enterprise Edition and sized its opportunity for the business case. The job was reconciling developer needs, engineering feasibility and commercial logic.
What I delivered
- A PRD and experience prototypes
- AI-powered features for Db2 developers and DevOps teams, across SQL modernization, diagnostics, governance and support
- An MCP server that exposes the product's functions to IBM's agentic AI coding assistant, plus the licensing architecture (both approved)
- Pricing, packaging and a phased roadmap
How I approached it
Turning an ambiguous opportunity into an approved plan.
- 01
Find the unmet jobs to be done.
I analyzed 376 GitHub and internal support issues to find where developers and teams struggled. Those pain points shaped the feature priorities.
- 02
Test the shape of the product.
Packaging was the heart of it: which capabilities larger teams need, how to bundle them, and how to position the edition beside the existing extension. I tested concepts and prototypes early to make those trade-offs visible. The roadmap runs in phases, from connections, catalog reads and stored-procedure execution to integrated workload tuning.
- 03
Make the investment case.
I tied the priorities to pricing, packaging and sequencing, and sized a $20M revenue opportunity for the business case, built on data from past business cases and analysis from senior leadership. Leadership approved it and locked general availability for 1Q27, and my packaging was adopted.
Outcome
What I learned
Product management often creates the most value before engineering begins. This work made me defend one concept from three directions: desirability for users, feasibility for engineering, and viability for the business.