Does a Product Manager Need to be Technical?
How you can transform your product management game
As a product manager, you don't necessarily need to be a software engineer or have advanced technical skills. But let's be honest, having technical know-how can be incredibly useful and beneficial. In this edition, I’ll explore why technical skills like SQL, Python, Excel, PowerBI, cloud development, and more are valuable for product managers, and how they can help you be a more effective leader. I’ll also provide some methods that could help you become more technical and level up your product management abilities.
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
- Steve Jobs
The Benefits of Technical Skills for Product Managers
Product management is a multifaceted role that requires a variety of skills, including strategic thinking, problem-solving, and excellent communication. However, having technical skills in areas like SQL, Cloud Development, etc., can give product managers a significant advantage in their role.
"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."
-Henry Ford
By having technical skills, product managers can go beyond the surface level and dive deep into the technical details of their product, which can lead to new insights and a greater understanding of the product they are managing.
Filling Skill Gaps on Your Team
Sometimes, as a product manager, you'll run into gaps in skills on your team. For example, if your team needs to analyze a large data set and nobody has experience with SQL, you'll need to determine whether this is a skill you should fill or if it's something you need to hire externally.
In situations like this, having technical skills can be incredibly valuable. If you have the ability to quickly write a SQL query or use a tool like PowerBI to visualize data, you'll be able to fill the gap and keep your team moving forward. This not only saves you time, but it also shows your team that you're committed to their success. This is also one of the best ways to build influence with your team - and as we all know, one of the key aspects of product management is to influence without authority.
"The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority." - Kenneth Blanchard
Personal Experience
I can speak from personal experience about the benefits of having technical skills as a product manager. In my role, my experience with databases and the Azure cloud has allowed me to build a strong relationship with my development team. When difficult database queries, changes, or optimizations need to be done, I am able to get into the deep technical details and brainstorm with my team on ways to improve the product. This has resulted in greater credibility on my project with my team, a deeper understanding of the product we've built, and ultimately a better product delivered to our end users.
Having technical skills is a bit of a superpower. It allows you to estimate time frames, identify potential problems and steer clear of time-consuming tasks. Nonetheless, most product managers do not possess this skill and may not have written any code or have a solid understanding of software development. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy when communicating with engineers.
The good news
You don’t really need to learn how to code! Focus on what you’re good at. As a product manager, you should optimize to understand problems, grasp concepts, and distill that down in a way that will help you make decisions.
Step 1 - Learn 👀
Youtube is your friend. There are tons of resources here to get you started, and the concepts I would suggest are shown below along with some (short) videos that will help you get started on the topics:
Step 2 - Ask 🙋🏽♂️
You don’t need to know everything as a product manager, and no-one expects you to know everything. Once you have some idea of how things work from the above, ask questions of your development team. They do this stuff all the time and they love explaining their craft (more often than not). If you think about it, it’s a win-win situation for them - 15 minutes spent explaining a concept to a curious product manager saves them potential hours of frustration down the line.
At one point, the senior engineer I was working with took an hour to explain the entire deployment pipeline of our application to me and all the quirks and nuances he had to consider when working with Azure. The ROI of this one hour became incredibly clear over the next two years with hundreds of hours saved troubleshooting issues on other projects. Due to my newfound knowledge, I was able to guide other teams to look at particular aspects of CI/CD pipelines, integrations, etc. I even did some of the coding myself in some cases when we were in a pinch! I now regularly try to ask questions on how things are going until I get to the point where I can intelligently speak on most topics, and shield my engineering team from distractions as much as possible.
So my advice: Get your engineering lead a coffee and talk tech!
Questions you could ask:
If we wanted to add a feature to do ‘X’, what would be involved - technically and effort wise? What are the steps we would take if we were to go down that path?
Can you share your screen with me as you update ‘Y’ in this part of the app?
Can you roughly explain to me how the application is architected?
How would you onboard a junior person onto the project?
Step 3 - Experiment 🛠️
Now you have some technical knowledge, and you’re learned from your team what goes into the products you are working on. So go and build something! Nothing beats hands on experience and experimentation. You can start with low code tools and get some of your simple ideas off the ground, then dive deep into the coding realm. Udemy, Coursera, freeCodeCamp, etc. all have a plethora of resources that enable you get off the ground quickly. If you want to become a developer, there is a lot of depth and ground to cover. To become a “technical” product manager, I recommend just continuously pursuing more knowledge in this realm - the best way to solidify that knowledge is to do things like build tools for yourself. Put on your product management hat and get the best of both worlds!
Secret sauce
ChatGPT explains and helps write code surprisingly well. So use it to your advantage. It’s an incredible resource!
Some questions to consider ⁉️
In the future, it will be interesting to see how the role of product management evolves and the impact that technical skills will have on the industry. As the industry evolves and PM roles become more popular, will technical skills become a standard requirement for product managers, or will the focus remain on strategic thinking and problem-solving? Only time will tell, but for now, being tech-savvy can certainly give product managers a competitive edge in the industry.
So, what do you think? How have technical skills impacted your role as a product manager, and do you believe that they will become a standard requirement in the future? Let me know in the comments below!
Great tip on buying m your senior engineers a coffee and just listening to them and absorbing as much as you can :)