Day 5/30: Technical Skills for Product Managers
Do product managers really need to know how to write code? 🤔
I truly don’t think a Product Manager needs to have technical skills.
However, we need to have a certain level of technical understanding and appreciation with the ultimate goal of working with our technical partners and teammates more effectively to provide solutions that solve our target audience’s problems.
After all, it’s hard to make tough decisions when you don’t understand the risks of the underlying tools being used.
So how might you develop technical understanding?
From past experiences, even as a non-PM, I've yet to meet an engineer who wasn't happy to answer any questions I thought I needed to ask to better understand the situation before making decisions.
Take notes so you can learn and digest this information, and build out your own technical understanding repository in a way that helps you best retain the information over time. This will also prevent you from unintentionally putting yourself in the awkward situation where you end up asking the exact same question that you’ve asked before. 😉
I also recommend asking the Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, or other Engineering leader whom they recommend to give you a walkthrough of a systems overview of their architecture and the tech stack they use.