Hello, Sonja! Shed some light on your journey. How did you become a Dynatracer?
Hi everyone! I'm Sonja, a Product Manager at Dynatrace. My job is to work with a lot of smart people across the company to make sure we're building things that matter to our users.
I grew up in Switzerland and got into tech early. Around 12, I was reading programming books and building my first websites. I did my computer science degree in Switzerland, then came to Austria for a one-year exchange at FH Hagenberg, a small university just outside Linz. I met my partner there and decided to stay.
I started my career as a developer but kept being pulled toward the problem-solving conversations rather than the implementation. I moved into project management, then sales engineering. That last step was important. It put me in front of customers, helped me understand their real problems, and taught me to connect technical knowledge to business needs. That's still how I think today.
I joined Dynatrace in 2014 as a Product Manager, when the company was much smaller. There was a very clear sense we were working on something unique. After 8 years working on many different parts of the product, and with the company having grown so much, I wanted to get new perspectives. I left to experience start-up life working for an API management company.
That time gave me a different perspective on observability challenges, and eventually, after many conversations with Dynatracers, I rejoined in 2024. I still have my old Dynatrace badge and got back my community account. It felt a bit like coming home.
What do you work on, and what interesting things are you currently involved in?
I'm now the Product Manager for the Workflows app and Automation Engine. My focus is on making it easy for teams to build workflows on top of Dynatrace's observability data. Things like automated remediation that turn insights into action. It's a space where product understanding, technical depth, user experience, and real operational impact all come together, which is very interesting for me.
No two days look the same, which I love. I might start with an engineering sync, spend time on user research talking with our users and reading the community forum, work on a product specification, and later jump into a roadmap conversation with GTM. I like variety, and I like that the work has a direct impact on how people use the product.
What's particularly exciting right now is how automation is evolving with AI. Agentic workflows are helping our users solve problems quicker, and I work closely with many different teams to figure out what that means for our users.
The goal is always the same: workflows that are easy to set up, that solve real problems, and that users can trust. That last part matters a lot with AI. One thing we have recently added is approval requests in a workflow that enables you to pause, get a summary, and accept or cancel the changes. When AI is taking action on your behalf, having a human in the loop at the right moment is essential.
I see many of our customers already experimenting with AI and agentic workflows, and I'm curious to see how those practices will evolve over the next couple of years. And of course, how we can best support them in Dynatrace.
Your "aha!" moment with Dynatrace — was there a recent problem you solved using our product?
I've had many over the years. The first one was discovering distributed tracing. I remember thinking about all the time I had lost in previous jobs trying to understand what was wrong, with no visibility into the problem at all. Realizing that Dynatrace could give you that was a real moment.
What's interesting is that the core problem hasn't changed. Systems are just much more complex now. I still hear users come to us with stories about how their infrastructure, services, and deployment environments, as well as how their users interact with them, are getting harder to understand.
But what has changed is where Dynatrace fits in. It's no longer just about finding the problem after something breaks. It's about understanding your system well enough that you can fix issues before they happen, shifting from reactive to proactive. And now with AI, that shift is accelerating. Automated decisions, faster responses, less manual work. That's still what excites me most about this space.
What makes the Dynatrace Community important to you?
"Hearing directly from users keeps us honest."
As a product manager for a B2B product, I often receive feedback indirectly through a sales engineer, a customer team, or someone passing along a user's message. It's not always easy to speak directly with the people who use the product every day. The community is where I can get real feedback from the end-users.
I try to capture the insights I find there so I can follow up once we ship something relevant to those users. The community also reveals blind spots. When you know the product so well and see the same question come up repeatedly, you realize there is still work to do.
I try to read all the posts about workflows. I might not always answer, but I'm taking notes on things we could improve or should look at.
What are your hobbies or passions? What keeps you motivated and brings you the most joy?
Family is really important to me. We have two boys. My oldest is 9 and is completely into building things, electronics, how stuff works. We just ordered a 3D printer together, so that's going to be an adventure. Please share tips if you have some!
My youngest is 6 and lives for soccer and Pokémon. I can now name so many Pokémon.
My happy place is the mountains. Hiking, swimming in a lake, or if I'm feeling brave, ice bathing. There's something about being in nature that resets everything. It's the best way I know to enjoy life.
How can we find you online?
Find and contact me on LinkedIn.
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