Many development manager resumes fail because they read like task lists and bury leadership impact. This development manager resume guide shows how to pass ATS screening and win fast recruiter scans in a crowded field.
You need to emphasize outcomes: teams scaled, delivery accelerated, and quality improved. Show metrics like cycle time reduced, defects lowered, uptime increased, and budget owned. Highlight scope such as multi-team roadmaps, critical releases shipped, and measurable user or revenue impact. Knowing how to make your resume stand out is essential when competing for senior leadership roles like this one.
Key takeaways
- Use reverse-chronological format to showcase growing leadership scope and delivery accountability.
- Quantify achievements with metrics like cycle time, uptime, attrition, and cost savings.
- Tailor every resume to the job posting's language, tools, and priority outcomes.
- Demonstrate skills through measurable results in your experience section, not just a skills list.
- Lead your summary with team size, domain expertise, and one concrete business outcome.
- Add certifications like PMP, CSM, or AWS to validate technical and leadership credibility.
- Use Enhancv to turn vague responsibilities into focused, results-driven resume bullets.
Job market snapshot for development managers
We analyzed 2,975 recent development manager job ads across major US job boards. These numbers help you understand employer expectations, industry demand, salary landscape at a glance.
What level of experience employers are looking for development managers
| Years of Experience | Percentage found in job ads |
|---|---|
| 1–2 years | 5.4% (160) |
| 3–4 years | 9.3% (276) |
| 5–6 years | 19.2% (570) |
| 7–8 years | 8.2% (245) |
| 9–10 years | 5.7% (171) |
| 10+ years | 7.5% (222) |
| Not specified | 50.0% (1488) |
Development manager ads by area of specialization (industry)
| Industry (Area) | Percentage found in job ads |
|---|---|
| Finance & Banking | 61.6% (1833) |
| Healthcare | 22.6% (672) |
| Education | 4.5% (134) |
| Manufacturing | 3.2% (94) |
| Retail & E-commerce | 2.8% (82) |
| Government | 1.2% (36) |
| Telecommunications | 1.0% (29) |
| Real Estate & Construction | 0.9% (28) |
| Professional Services | 0.8% (25) |
| Energy | 0.7% (21) |
Top companies hiring development managers
| Company | Percentage found in job ads |
|---|---|
| PwC | 3.7% (111) |
| Molina Healthcare Inc. | 2.8% (83) |
| Danaher | 2.5% (75) |
| Amazon.com, Inc. | 2.4% (70) |
| Aggreko | 1.5% (44) |
| Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, LLC | 1.5% (44) |
| ABM | 1.3% (39) |
| Google LLC | 1.2% (37) |
| Assa Abloy | 1.2% (36) |
| Pilot Flying J | 1.2% (36) |
Role overview stats
These tables show the most common responsibilities and employment types for development manager roles. Use them to align your resume with what employers expect and to understand how the role is structured across the market.
Day-to-day activities and top responsibilities for a development manager
| Responsibility | Percentage found in job ads |
|---|---|
| Crm | 19.2% (571) |
| Salesforce | 17.1% (509) |
| Excel | 13.2% (394) |
| Project management | 11.2% (332) |
| Microsoft office | 10.8% (320) |
| Business development | 9.2% (275) |
| Sales | 9.2% (273) |
| Powerpoint | 6.9% (205) |
| Word | 6.7% (198) |
| Negotiation | 5.8% (174) |
| Agile | 4.3% (128) |
| Financial modeling | 4.1% (121) |
Type of employment (remote vs on-site vs hybrid)
| Employment type | Percentage found in job ads |
|---|---|
| On-site | 61.9% (1843) |
| Remote | 22.4% (666) |
| Hybrid | 15.7% (466) |
How to format a development manager resume
Recruiters evaluating development manager candidates prioritize evidence of leadership scope, team growth, delivery accountability, and measurable business outcomes. A reverse-chronological format surfaces these signals immediately by showing a clear progression of increasing responsibility across engineering or product development organizations. Choosing the right resume format is the first critical decision that shapes how your qualifications are perceived.
I have significant experience in this role—which format should I use?
Use a reverse-chronological format—it's the strongest choice for experienced development managers because it foregrounds your leadership trajectory and expanding scope of ownership. Do:
- Lead with your most senior role and clearly define the size of teams, departments, or cross-functional organizations you managed.
- Highlight domain expertise in relevant areas such as SDLC methodologies, CI/CD pipelines, Agile/Scrum frameworks, resource planning tools, and stakeholder management.
- Quantify business impact through delivery metrics, efficiency gains, retention improvements, or revenue contributions tied directly to your leadership decisions.
Why hybrid and functional resumes don't work for senior roles
Hybrid formats fragment your career narrative by pulling key accomplishments out of their timeline context, which obscures the progression of leadership scope and decision-making authority that hiring teams need to see. Functional formats are even more problematic—they strip accountability from specific roles entirely, making it impossible for recruiters to evaluate how your impact scaled as your responsibilities grew. Avoid both formats entirely if you have five or more years of management experience, hold director-level or equivalent titles, or are targeting roles where organizational leadership and delivery ownership are core expectations.
- A functional format may be acceptable only if you're transitioning into development management from a purely technical track with no prior management titles, but even then, every listed skill must be anchored to specific projects, team outcomes, or measurable results rather than presented in isolation.
Once your layout and formatting choices are in place, the next step is deciding which sections to include so each one reinforces your qualifications as a development manager.
What sections should go on a development manager resume
Recruiters expect to see clear evidence that you lead teams, deliver software, and improve outcomes at scale. Understanding what to put on a resume for a leadership role like this ensures every section earns its place.
Use this structure for maximum clarity:
- Header
- Summary
- Experience
- Skills
- Projects
- Education
- Certifications
- Optional sections: Awards, Open-source work, Volunteering
Your experience bullets should emphasize measurable impact, delivery outcomes, team scope, and the results you drove across people, process, and technology.
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Once you’ve organized your resume with the right components in place, the next step is to write your development manager experience section so each role clearly supports the structure you’ve built.
How to write your development manager resume experience
The experience section is where you prove you can ship products, lead engineering teams, and drive measurable outcomes using the tools, frameworks, and methodologies that define modern software development management. Hiring managers prioritize demonstrated impact—what you delivered and how it moved the business forward—over descriptive task lists that simply recount daily responsibilities.
Each entry should include:
- Job title
- Company and location (or remote)
- Dates of employment (month and year)
Three to five concise bullet points showing what you owned, how you executed, and what outcomes you delivered:
- Ownership scope: the engineering teams, product lines, codebases, platforms, or technical roadmaps you were directly accountable for as a development manager.
- Execution approach: the development methodologies, project management frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, architecture decisions, or resource allocation strategies you used to plan and deliver work.
- Value improved: the changes you drove in code quality, release velocity, system reliability, technical debt reduction, team retention, or deployment efficiency that strengthened the development organization.
- Collaboration context: how you partnered with product managers, designers, QA engineers, DevOps teams, executive stakeholders, or external vendors to align technical execution with business priorities.
- Impact delivered: the outcomes your leadership produced—expressed through product launches, scale achieved, developer productivity gains, or direct business results rather than a summary of activities performed.
Experience bullet formula
A development manager experience example
✅ Right example - modern, quantified, specific.
Development Manager
NimbusPay | Austin, TX
2021–Present
B2B payments platform processing over $2B annually across fintech and enterprise clients.
- Led a team of nine engineers across three squads, delivering twenty-six releases using Agile Scrum, Jira, and GitHub Actions, and improved on-time delivery from 72% to 93%.
- Implemented CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Terraform, and Kubernetes, cutting deployment time from forty-five minutes to eight minutes and reducing rollback incidents by 38%.
- Partnered with product managers and designers to define quarterly roadmaps, run discovery workshops, and ship five major workflow upgrades that increased activation by 14% and reduced support tickets by 22%.
- Drove reliability improvements by formalizing incident response with PagerDuty, SLOs, and postmortems, decreasing Sev 1 incidents by 41% and improving uptime from 99.85% to 99.95%.
- Strengthened security and compliance by rolling out OWASP-aligned threat modeling, Snyk scanning, and SOC 2 controls, reducing critical vulnerabilities by 57% and passing two external audits with zero high-risk findings.
Now that you've seen how a strong experience section comes together, let's look at how to adjust those details to match the specific role you're targeting.
How to tailor your development manager resume experience
Recruiters evaluate your development manager resume through both human review and applicant tracking systems (ATS), so tailoring your resume to the job description increases your chances of advancing. Tailoring means adjusting how you present your work to reflect the specific language, priorities, and expectations each employer outlines.
Ways to tailor your development manager experience:
- Match the programming languages and frameworks listed in the job description.
- Mirror the project management methodologies the employer specifically references.
- Use the same terminology for development lifecycle stages and processes.
- Reflect KPIs or success criteria the posting highlights for team performance.
- Include relevant industry or domain experience that the role requires.
- Emphasize security or compliance practices when the posting calls for them.
- Highlight cross-functional collaboration models or workflows the employer values.
- Align your leadership scope with the team size and structure described.
Tailoring your resume means framing real accomplishments in language that directly reflects what the employer is asking for, not forcing keywords where they don't belong.
Resume tailoring examples for development manager
| Job description excerpt | Untailored | Tailored |
|---|---|---|
| "Lead cross-functional Agile teams to deliver SaaS products on time and within budget, using Jira for sprint planning and backlog management." | Led teams to deliver software projects successfully. | Led four cross-functional Agile teams of 28 engineers delivering a B2B SaaS platform, using Jira for sprint planning and backlog refinement—reducing cycle time by 31% and maintaining 95% on-time delivery across 12 quarterly releases. |
| "Drive adoption of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices to improve deployment frequency and reduce production incidents." | Helped improve deployment processes and reduce issues. | Drove adoption of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and GitHub Actions across three product teams, increasing deployment frequency from biweekly to daily and reducing production incidents by 42% over six months through automated testing gates and infrastructure-as-code practices. |
| "Mentor and grow a team of 15+ engineers, conducting regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning to reduce attrition." | Managed a team of engineers and supported their growth. | Mentored a team of 18 engineers through structured 1:1s, quarterly performance reviews, and individual career development plans—promoting five engineers to senior roles within 18 months and reducing annual attrition from 22% to 9%. |
Once you’ve aligned your experience with the role’s priorities, quantify your development manager achievements to show the impact behind those responsibilities.
How to quantify your development manager achievements
Quantifying achievements shows how your leadership changed outcomes, not just activity. Use delivery speed, reliability, quality, cost, and risk numbers tied to releases, incidents, and team throughput.
Quantifying examples for development manager
| Metric | Example |
|---|---|
| Delivery speed | "Cut release cadence from monthly to weekly by standardizing Jira workflows and CI in GitHub Actions, improving lead time from twelve to five days." |
| Reliability | "Reduced Sev-one incidents by 38% in two quarters by adding on-call runbooks, SLO dashboards in Datadog, and post-incident reviews." |
| Quality | "Lowered production defect escape rate from 4.2% to 1.6% by enforcing code reviews, raising unit test coverage to 72%, and adding SonarQube gates." |
| Cost efficiency | "Saved $180,000 annually by rightsizing Kubernetes clusters, setting autoscaling policies, and eliminating unused cloud resources via weekly cost reports." |
| Security risk | "Cut critical vulnerabilities older than thirty days from 46 to six by implementing Snyk scans in CI and a two-week patch service-level agreement." |
Turn vague job duties into measurable, recruiter-ready resume bullets in seconds with Enhancv's Bullet Point Generator.
Once you've crafted strong, results-driven bullet points, you'll want to ensure your resume also highlights the right mix of hard and soft skills that define an effective development manager.
How to list your hard and soft skills on a development manager resume
Your skills section matters for development managers because it shows how you plan, ship, and improve products; recruiters and applicant tracking systems scan this section for keyword match and role fit; aim for a balanced mix of hard skills and execution-focused soft skills. development manager roles require a blend of:
- Product strategy and discovery skills.
- Data, analytics, and experimentation skills.
- Delivery, execution, and go-to-market discipline.
- Soft skills.
Your skills section should be:
- Scannable (bullet-style grouping).
- Relevant to the job post.
- Backed by proof in experience bullets.
- Updated with current tools.
Place your skills section:
- Above experience if you're junior or switching careers.
- Below experience if you're mid/senior with strong achievements.
Hard skills
- Roadmap planning, prioritization
- Agile delivery, Scrum, Kanban
- Jira, Confluence
- OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
- User stories, acceptance criteria
- Requirements gathering, BRDs, PRDs
- SQL, data querying
- Product analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel
- A/B testing, experimentation design
- API integrations, REST, JSON
- CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions
- Cloud platforms, AWS, Azure
Soft skills
- Align stakeholders on tradeoffs
- Run cross-functional planning
- Translate strategy into milestones
- Drive decisions with data
- Communicate risks early
- Negotiate scope and timelines
- Lead incident and postmortem reviews
- Resolve dependencies and blockers
- Write clear, actionable specs
- Coach and develop team members
- Manage up with concise updates
- Own outcomes end to end
How to show your development manager skills in context
Skills shouldn't live only in a dedicated skills list. Explore resume skills examples to see how top candidates weave competencies throughout their resumes.
They should be demonstrated in:
- Your summary (high-level professional identity)
- Your experience (proof through outcomes)
Here's how that looks in practice.
Summary example
Development manager with 12 years leading cross-functional engineering teams in fintech. Skilled in Agile delivery, CI/CD pipelines, and stakeholder alignment. Drove a 30% reduction in release cycle time while mentoring 40+ developers across distributed squads.
- Reflects senior-level experience clearly
- Names relevant tools and methods
- Includes a measurable delivery outcome
- Highlights mentorship as a soft skill
Experience example
Senior Development Manager
Brightly Financial | Remote
March 2019–January 2024
- Implemented Jira-based sprint workflows with product and QA teams, cutting average delivery time by 22% across three product lines.
- Partnered with DevOps to migrate CI/CD pipelines to GitHub Actions, reducing deployment failures by 35% within six months.
- Coached a team of 18 engineers through quarterly OKR planning, improving goal attainment rates from 61% to 89%.
- Every bullet includes measurable proof.
- Skills surface naturally through real outcomes.
Once you’ve tied your development manager abilities to measurable outcomes and real work examples, the next step is to apply that approach to a development manager resume when you don’t have direct experience.
How do I write a development manager resume with no experience
Even without full-time experience, you can demonstrate readiness through:
- Capstone product delivery leadership.
- Volunteer program build and launch.
- Internship sprint planning ownership.
- Student organization roadmap management.
- Freelance client project coordination.
- Open-source release management contributions.
- Hackathon team lead delivery.
If you're in this situation, our guide on building a resume without work experience offers a detailed framework for showcasing transferable skills and leadership potential.
Focus on:
- Scope, timeline, and budget ownership.
- Metrics: adoption, revenue, cost savings.
- Cross-functional delivery using Agile methods.
- Tools: Jira, Asana, GitHub, SQL.
Resume format tip for entry-level development manager
Use a combination resume format because it highlights delivery skills and tools first, while still showing relevant projects and leadership experience. Do:
- Lead with a summary of tools and methods.
- Add a projects section above work history.
- Write bullets with scope, actions, and results.
- Include one to two metrics per project.
- Match keywords to the job description.
- Led a volunteer program launch using Jira and a Scrum sprint cadence, coordinating five contributors and delivering in six weeks, increasing sign-ups by 28%.
Even without direct experience, your educational background can strengthen your development manager resume—here's how to present it effectively.
How to list your education on a development manager resume
Your education section helps hiring teams confirm you have the foundational knowledge needed for a development manager role. It validates technical expertise and leadership training quickly.
Include:
- Degree name
- Institution
- Location
- Graduation year
- Relevant coursework (for juniors or entry-level candidates)
- Honors & GPA (if 3.5 or higher)
Skip month and day details—list the graduation year only.
Here's a strong education entry tailored to a development manager resume:
Example education entry
Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Graduated: 2016
GPA: 3.7/4.0
- Relevant Coursework: Software Project Management, Agile Methodologies, Systems Architecture, Team Leadership Fundamentals
- Honors: Magna Cum Laude, Dean's List (six consecutive semesters)
How to list your certifications on a development manager resume
Certifications show a development manager's commitment to learning, proficiency with key tools, and alignment with current industry standards. They also signal credibility when you lead teams, manage delivery, and partner with stakeholders.
Include:
- Certificate name
- Issuing organization
- Year
- Optional: credential ID or URL
- Place certifications below education when your degree is recent and directly related to the development manager role.
- Place certifications above education when they are recent, highly relevant, or required for the development manager role you target.
Best certifications for your development manager resume
- Project Management Professional (PMP)
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
- Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I)
- SAFe Scrum Master (SSM)
- ITIL 4 Foundation
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
Once you’ve placed your credentials where recruiters can quickly verify them, move to your development manager resume summary to connect those qualifications to the value you deliver.
How to write your development manager resume summary
Your resume summary is the first thing a recruiter reads, so it needs to earn their attention fast. A strong summary frames you as the right development manager by signaling leadership, technical depth, and real results.
Keep it to three to four lines, with:
- Your title and total years of experience in software development management.
- The domain or industry you've led teams in, such as SaaS, fintech, or e-commerce.
- Core skills like Agile methodology, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, or cross-functional coordination.
- One or two measurable achievements, such as team growth, delivery speed, or cost reduction.
- Soft skills tied to outcomes, like mentoring that improved retention or communication that aligned engineering with product goals.
PRO TIP
At this level, lead with scope and business impact rather than listing tools or daily tasks. Highlight how many engineers you've managed, what you delivered, and how it moved the needle. Avoid vague phrases like "passionate leader" or "results-driven professional." Recruiters want proof, not promises.
Example summary for a development manager
Development manager with eight years of experience leading cross-functional engineering teams in SaaS. Scaled a 12-person team while reducing deployment cycle times by 35%. Drove Agile adoption that cut sprint spillover by half.
Optimize your resume summary and objective for ATS
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Now that your summary captures your leadership strengths and technical expertise, make sure your header presents the essential contact details recruiters need to reach you.
What to include in a development manager resume header
A resume header is the top section with your key details, and it boosts visibility, credibility, and recruiter screening for a development manager role.
Essential resume header elements
- Full name
- Tailored job title and headline
- Location
- Phone number
- Professional email
- GitHub link
- Portfolio link
A LinkedIn link helps recruiters verify experience quickly and supports screening.
Don't include a photo on a development manager resume unless the role is explicitly front-facing or appearance-dependent.
Keep your header to one or two lines, match the development manager title to the posting, and use consistent formatting across every contact link.
Example
Development manager resume header
Jordan Lee
Development manager | Backend delivery, team leadership, and scalable systems
Austin, TX
(512) 555-01XX
your.name@enhancv.com
github.com/yourname
yourwebsite.com
linkedin.com/in/yourname
Once your header clearly identifies you and makes it easy for employers to reach you, add optional sections that reinforce your qualifications and support the rest of your resume.
Additional sections for development manager resumes
When your core sections don't fully capture your qualifications, additional sections can strengthen your credibility and set you apart from other candidates. For example, listing language skills can be a differentiator when applying to global or distributed teams.
- Languages
- Technical certifications
- Publications and conference talks
- Open source contributions
- Professional affiliations and memberships
- Volunteer leadership experience
- Patents
Once you've rounded out your resume with the right supplementary sections, it's worth pairing it with a strong cover letter to make an even greater impact.
Do development manager resumes need a cover letter
A cover letter isn't required for a development manager, but it helps in competitive searches or when hiring managers expect one. If you're unsure where to start, learn what a cover letter is and how it complements your resume. It can make a difference when your resume needs context or when you want to show strong alignment quickly.
Use a cover letter to add details your resume can't:
- Explain role and team fit by naming the org's stack, collaboration style, and how you lead delivery, quality, and people development.
- Highlight one or two projects with clear outcomes, such as cycle time improvements, reliability gains, or successful cross-team launches.
- Show you understand the product, users, and business context by referencing a specific metric, workflow, or customer pain point.
- Address career transitions or non-obvious experience by connecting past roles to development manager responsibilities and scope.
Drop your resume here or choose a file.
PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.
Even if you decide not to include a cover letter, AI can help you strengthen your development manager resume by improving its clarity, relevance, and impact.
Using AI to improve your development manager resume
AI can sharpen your resume's clarity, structure, and impact. It helps tighten language and highlight results. But overuse strips authenticity. Once your content feels clear and role-aligned, step away from AI. If you want to get started, explore ChatGPT resume writing prompts tailored for professional resumes.
Here are 10 practical prompts to strengthen specific sections of your development manager resume:
Strengthen your summary
Quantify experience bullets
Tighten action verbs
Align skills section
Improve project descriptions
Refine education details
Highlight certifications strategically
Remove redundant phrasing
Tailor for specific roles
Check consistency throughout
Conclusion
A strong development manager resume proves impact with measurable outcomes, role-specific skills, and a clear structure. It highlights delivery, team leadership, planning, and cross-functional alignment. It stays focused, easy to scan, and tailored to the role.
This approach shows you’re ready for today’s hiring market and near-future expectations. Clear results, relevant skills, and clean formatting help hiring teams trust your judgment. They also help you move faster from screening to interviews.
