John Agan
Practitioner · Executive · Advisor · Investor
Santa Barbara · SF · Chicago · Atlanta
resume@johnagan.com · johnagan.com · linkedin.com/in/johnagan · Chicago, IL
Summary
I help developers build successful products, teams, and businesses.
My craft is developer platforms and AI — the marketplaces, partnerships, and integrations that give developers leverage, alongside the AI strategy, agents, and extensibility patterns reshaping how they build.
The through-line across 30 years — at GitHub, Slack, Twitch, Atlassian, Webflow, Replit, Postman, and three companies I founded: I join early platform moments and help move them from 0→1, shaping APIs and SDKs, integrations, partnerships, product direction, marketplaces, and ecosystem programs.
After a decade on the exec track — Director through VP — I made a deliberate choice in 2025 to return to the hands-on craft. The best work I've done has always been technical: API surfaces, partner integrations, the 0→1 platform launches. The org chart was never the point.
Core Craft
Experience
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Aganomix LLC — Principal
Aganomix is my independent practice at the intersection of developer experience and AI. Engagements help product and partnerships teams ship AI-powered products developers love — blending principal engineering, AI-strategy advisory, and prototype-driven partner development.
- Postman — AI Entrepreneur in Residence. Work alongside Postman's product and partnerships teams on AI-integration opportunities.
- JP Morgan Chase — AI Strategy Advisor, Brand Team. Advised on applying gen-AI to accelerate designer concept work while staying grounded in the bank's brand system.
- Carlyle — AI Strategy Advisor. Advised on applied AI strategy across the firm.
- Chicago developer-platform founders. Advisor and angel investor — product strategy, DevEx, and GTM at the seed stage where the first DevEx decisions shape trajectory.
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Replit — VP, Product & Data
Hired to move Replit from a classroom product into a B2B SaaS company — drove product and data strategy through a ~50-person org spanning Product Management, Product Engineering, Data Science & Engineering, Developer Relations, and Support (~40% of the company at peak).
- Worked through the product's B2B blockers and established enterprise partnerships — including Google, Anthropic, Perplexity, and NeonDB — to validate upmarket credibility.
- Shipped Replit AI Agent, Core, Teams, Deployments, and related AI surfaces — the professional-tier products that anchored the B2B transition.
- Drove a >500% year-over-year increase in revenue.
- Stood up the data platform and reporting stack (BigQuery, Segment, Amplitude) and hired the team to own it.
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Webflow — Head of Developer Experience / DevRel
Led the transition of Webflow from a "no-code" tool to a developer-extensible platform.
- Launched the Webflow App Marketplace — debuted at Webflow Conf with 25+ apps — alongside third-party APIs and early AI/IDE-extension "labs" experiments, mostly through hands-on coding and a small purpose-built team.
- Established technical platform partnerships with Stripe, Figma, HubSpot, and other ecosystem partners.
- Built the product-analytics and developer-health instrumentation so partner and customer signal was measurable.
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Atlassian — Senior Director, Developer Experience
Drove Atlassian's developer experience across Jira, Trello, Forge, and beyond through a ~45-person cross-functional team spanning PM, Engineering, DevRel, Partner Engineering, Technical Content, and Developer Support.
- Shaped the Forge roadmap — Atlassian's serverless extensibility surface — translating third-party developer requirements into core platform capabilities.
- Led all developer content at Atlassian — developer docs, the developer community, and support for the Atlassian Marketplace — the full off-product surface where third-party developers learn, collaborate, and ship.
- Reduced the open developer issue backlog by 75% — clearing long-accumulated friction across docs, community, and support.
- Fed external developer and partner requirements into the broader platform roadmap, accelerating Atlassian's server-to-cloud adoption.
- Led Atlassian's technical partner relationships with AWS, GitHub, Slack, and other key integrations — directly improving the customer developer experience inside the Atlassian product suite.
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Twitch — Single-Threaded Leader, Identity & Developer APIs
Ran 10 Tier-1 services at Twitch — identity, auth, fraud, extensions, developer APIs, and supporting infrastructure — through PM, TPM, and Engineering teams.
- Rebuilt Twitch's developer identity infrastructure and API surface, improving security, resilience, and performance while unlocking new integration patterns.
- Led the launch of Twitch extensions for AAA game developers — 2K, Amazon Game Studios, Sony, and Blizzard — including Twitch Drops, which drove a >200% lift in viewer engagement.
- Replaced the legacy third-party API surface with a modern suite that opened new integration paths and closed abuse vectors.
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Slack — Head of Partner Engineering
Built Slack's partner-engineering function and helped turn the early platform motion into a durable partner-engineering org.
- Owned the technical relationship with every partner on the Slack platform from launch through 2018 — first directly, then alongside the partner-engineering team I built and led.
- Key contributor to the launch of the Slack Platform, App Directory, and Bots, and to the partnership/integration motions that moved Slack upmarket.
- Drove initial API and SDK design decisions and wrote supporting prototype code for the first wave of enterprise-focused partner integrations — including SAP, Workday, ServiceNow, Atlassian, and Salesforce — that materially supported the SMB-to-enterprise transition and unlocked enterprise compliance support.
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GitHub — Head of Solutions Engineering
Grew GitHub's technical field function from 5 Technical Account Managers to 50+ Solutions Engineers, expanding into global and government markets.
- Contributed directly to major GitHub Enterprise launches — merge-blocking, signed commits, LFS, and related workflow features that became industry-standard developer productivity primitives.
- Ran point on the technical relationship with major customers and partners — Home Depot, Nike, John Deere, PayPal, Adobe, Apple, and others.
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Salesforce — Principal User Experience Engineer
Early front-end engineer at Assistly — a customer-service SaaS acquired by Salesforce and relaunched as Desk.com — then led UX engineering for Salesforce Analytics Cloud following the EdgeSpring acquisition, contributing to Core Design and building experiences showcased at Dreamforce keynotes.
- Set the front-end direction for Assistly through the acquisition and rebrand as Desk.com — architecture, patterns, and UI primitives the team built on as the product scaled.
- Led UX engineering for Salesforce Analytics Cloud post-acquisition, including experiences showcased at Dreamforce keynotes.
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Blackwire — Co-founder & CEO
Founded Blackwire to put a modern API platform on top of legacy banking cores (Jack Henry, Fiserv) — giving credit unions and community banks the developer surface to ship customer-facing products without wiring into core systems directly.
- Designed and shipped the REST API surface and SDKs that abstracted core-banking primitives — the platform layer that let product and web teams build against the cores.
- Unlocked a new class of customer-facing experiences for credit unions and community banks — account opening, reporting, fraud detection, and third-party website integrations — all driven through the platform's developer APIs.
- Owned the technical relationships with Jack Henry and Fiserv and led the engineering and product team that built and operated the platform.
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Bluewolf — Practice Director, Sales Engineering
Hands-on technical lead on Fortune 100 deals at one of the leading Salesforce consulting firms — the practitioner the sales team brought in to unlock the deal.
- Worked directly with Fortune 100 customers and prospects on technical discovery — surfacing the blockers, and the deeper-engagement opportunities, that the sales motion alone couldn't see.
- Built working prototypes — and, where warranted, production implementations — inside customer environments, giving the deal the hands-on technical proof it needed to close.
- Turned those technical conversations into expanded engagement, identifying the deeper customer problems where Bluewolf could deliver more scope beyond the initial deal.
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RSUI Group, Inc. — Engineering Manager, Web Development & Analytics
Principal architect and lead developer across the web application portfolio at a wholesale insurance group — document management, executive dashboards, risk analysis, and accounting — while partnering with the CIO on IT operations, disaster-recovery modernization, and SharePoint-based portal strategy.
