Hello, Thomas! Shed some light on your journey. How did you become a Dynatracer?
Since primary school, I've known I wanted to do something with PCs, probably because my dad had one at home that completely fascinated me. I'd crash it regularly playing DOS games, and a colleague of his from the IT department would come over to fix it. Classic.
One cousin of my mother's had studied at the Technical University of Vienna, and somehow that planted a seed. From then on I knew: technical high school first, then university. In retrospect, stubborn and naïve.
The moment I had my first Java classes, I was hooked on the craft, the endless possibilities, the complexity. I loved all of it.
But here's the thing: across school, university, and even my Erasmus semester in Stockholm, studying Business Informatics of all things, I kept ending up as the project manager. First because nobody else wanted to, later because I was apparently the one crazy enough to rally the troops and say what needed to be said. I didn't plan it, it just kept happening.
Then I stumbled across Ben Horowitz's Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager and that was it. That was me.
I started in project management at a government-owned company, formal, slow, structured. Then a friend heading off to Google in Dublin left a consulting spot open at KPMG, and I took it despite always being skeptical of consultants. Life motto: never dismiss what you don't actually know yet.
Two years in, I learned a few things fast. Moving up means long hours, evenings and weekends, which I did. But then my wife got pregnant and I knew that pace wasn't compatible with being the father I wanted to be. And something deeper was missing too: I never got to build. Consulting, at least for me, was conceptual, short engagements, often alone. Plus, not seeing things go live frustrated me.
So I pivoted into B2C and became a Product Owner at one of Austria's biggest grocery chains, leading the engineering team behind their online store. Back to building. Back home.
From there, a few more moves and a drift toward behavioral web tracking which, as it turns out, was the breadcrumb trail leading me straight to Dynatrace.
Honestly? LinkedIn ads and my parents-in-law, who are Lower Austrians and basically told me: you have to try this company.
When a role in Real User Monitoring for web came up, it was a natural fit given my product ownership background in e-commerce and a short stint with analytics tools. In the very first interview I immediately clicked with Alex Sommer, the PM lead for Digital Experience at the time. Then came workshops, and I just felt it. This is the place. They gave me a chance to prove myself and I grabbed it.
What made it click beyond the role itself was that Dynatrace is a company where technology isn't a cost center or an afterthought, it's literally in the mission. For years, my closest friends had been telling me about life in tech companies, most of them having moved abroad for exactly that. I didn't want to relocate, especially not with a kid, and here was a tech company right at home.
I found my people, my industry, and my place, without having to move countries. And I still feel that way every day.
What do you work on, and what interesting things are you currently involved in?
I am the Product Manager for Dashboards, working in the Platform Apps capability, where I get to work with talented, caring, and fun people across multiple countries, sometimes continents, and time zones.
What I'm currently working on to some might sound like table stakes but matters a lot for adoption and our users. We're shipping public sharing of dashboards so users can share results with anyone outside Dynatrace, think leadership without an account or partners tracking system availability. We're improving mobile consumption so you don't miss a beat on the go, bringing cross-tile filtering to life so you can drill into log data by just interacting with it, no setup required, and tackling the challenge of efficiently querying petabyte-scale data across tiles and getting to insights within seconds. Four years in and it never gets boring.
There is no typical day, which is exactly why I love being a PM. The only constants are regular touchpoints with engineering, designers, and leads. Beyond that it's Slack, email, the community, and face-to-face at the coffee machine.
My days are either deep discovery work, reading community entries, checking product ideas, having customer calls, helping colleagues with dashboard challenges hands on, or it's delivery work, helping to answer tough implementation questions, writing release notes, blogs, and community updates. Sprinkled with roadmap and priority discussions to stay truly agile and keep listening to our users.
If there's one thing I still remember like it was yesterday, it's when we first went live with the new Dashboards and Notebooks app. All the late nights, the last-minute UI copy changes, the "super important" final features, and the official release we watched together in an all too crowded and hot meeting room, shipping something that felt, in retrospect, so fragile and unfinished, a great MVP to iterate.
And yet, deploying something for the first time is always magical. What that launch really meant was giving our field teams and users a new tool to tame their data through Grail and DQL, and the responsibility that comes with that is something I don't take lightly.
Your "aha!" moment with Dynatrace — was there a recent problem you solved using our product?
That first time using Grail and DQL to track our own app's usage was something many of us had been looking forward to, and it still holds true: Grail unlocked countless use cases to analyze Dynatrace with Dynatrace.
More recently, working on a feature not yet available to customers, I got to use the Dynatrace MCP in Visual Studio Code, and combining it with your favorite LLM still feels genuinely magical. For instance, replacing query snippets for our latest annotations feature as a small contribution to the code, probing DQL, adjusting existing examples, all of it with GitHub Copilot and the Dynatrace MCP side by side. Pure joy. And one thing I keep experiencing during such work is how true the statement "context is everything" is when working with AI to generate.
What makes the Dynatrace Community important to you?
"For someone who is genuinely interested in what other people struggle with and think, Community is simply the perfect place to meet and learn."
For example, when I switched over from Real User Monitoring, the community made that transition so much easier than it would have been otherwise. In roughly a month I could easily go through hundreds of product ideas and community forum threads, which gave me an incredibly fast and honest picture of the real pains and struggles of our users and made a difference in how fast I onboarded to the realm of Dashboards.
And today I still do regular product idea reviews and forum check-ins, simply to listen, learn, and above all help.
If there's one thing I'd pass on to other community members, it's this: show up with genuine curiosity and the willingness to engage, even when it doesn't come easy. And when a PM says no to your idea, it's rarely because your pain isn't real or your solution isn't smart. We simply work with limited resources. Pro tip: generalize your problem enough that others can relate and rally behind it, but don't shy away from the specific details that help us truly understand and solve it.
What are your hobbies or passions? What keeps you motivated and brings you the most joy?
In the past I started something new almost every year, but since our two boys arrived, some hobbies have started to settle in. Clearly a sign of getting old.
On Tuesdays you'll usually find me and one of my best friends at the climbing gym, crushing routes or complaining about work and family. We're Viennese, after all. The rest of the week it's swimming, biking, or running, since I've been doing triathlon for about a year and a half now. And whenever we can, the whole family heads outdoors, hiking and camping in summer, skiing in winter. We love nature and the simple life, the perfect antidote to the fast-paced software industry I spend my weeks in.
That's also where the most joy lives, doing any of these things together with my kids, who happen to be my biggest fans before, during, and after every competition. There is nothing quite like spotting them at the finish line after 5+ hours during a 70.3, clapping their hands off, giving everything they have just for you. Or coming home after a long bike ride to find one of them already waiting at the door, arm raised, ready for the high five. It teaches me the same lesson every single time: there is nothing more motivating and important than someone giving you their whole heart for something you love.
Anything on your bucket list?
Finally properly speaking Spanish. I've been doing one Duolingo lesson every day for over two years now, but at some point I'll need to actually prioritize it more to get there.
And this might sound cheesy, but being able to play the guitars I have hanging on my wall for far too long, at a campfire, singing songs with my two boys and my wife. As simple as that.
How can we find you online?
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