“Do I need to know coding to be a product manager?”
Out of the top, 5 Questions asked around Product management on the web and here on Product Career, one of them is
“Does a PdM need to have technical knowledge? If yes, to what extent? What can we call sound technical knowledge for PdMs?
Also, this role is often confused with Product Design. Product management and Product design are two separate roles.
Today we are going to bust all of these myths!
Let’s begin by understanding technical knowledge for PMs in a product based company.
Product Managers overall from technical knowledge perspective MUST HAVE —
- Basic technical understanding of their products
- Excited to learn more about the technical nature of their products
- Aware of the technical goings-on and trends in their industry
- Interpreting pros and cons of industry-relevant technology
- Expand their knowledge and understanding — the full breadth of a product’s stack and system architecture, data models, and APIs through self-guided learning located all over the internet. If you need more structured learning, try taking a class or two.
Let’s see few examples —
Is Salesforce exploding across your industry? If so you should boost your understanding of the platform and seek some hands-on experience. Is your company trying to migrate to the cloud? Then you should seek to understand basic cloud architecture. How it may impact your product’s systems architecture and data model. What is the tech stack used by your company and why? What is the latest technology in the market for a particular type of product?
How to find out WHAT TO LEARN?
- For Aspiring PMs: Find few companies you would like to work for and look at their job descriptions
- Working PMs willing to enhance technical knowledge: Talk to your developers and designers. Let’s say you are working on a project and there are few new technical things that you didn’t know. Ask your developer to spend 30 minutes with you and explain high level, take really good notes then have a deeper understanding of the subject come back to google. Make sure you study the subject further. Google and I have been best friends for a long time.
This exercise will over time do two major things for you as a PM —
Understanding technical trends and their impacts help good product managers influence great business and technology decisions.
Developing the logic to identify root problems and potential fixes will save your team time and earn their respect.
You will over time better in doing root-cause analysis (I wish I had known this earlier in my career)
I hope some of the myths were busted in this post around technical and design knowledge for PMs. ⠀
I’ll give a final quick example — ⠀
if someone asks what can use to build a website? What will be our immediate response? WordPress perhaps? It was mine. Because they have been around the longest. But as technology has progressed the problems in WordPress have been addressed by newer technologies. A newer, much more reliable, faster Content management system such as the open-source platform Ghost.org
Of course, there are others, but It is always nice to know the tech stack your product is built on.
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You will need these skills if you are looking to change your career to Product Management?