Tech for Non-Tech PMs

Recently Elon Musk tweeted that “all managers in a technical area must be technically excellent”. Even though the twitterati seems to be pretty split about his views, I feel, he isn’t entirely wrong, especially in the world of Product management! Frankly, industry has always maintained that one doesn’t need to be a software engineer to be a good product manager. But we all have been part of those dreaded calls with tech guys where you feel so outlandishly foolish with all their tech jargon and just silently pray that no one asks you any technical questions related to your requirements! 👀

🙅🏿Now, to avoid such scenarios, I am going to give you a brief peek into the world of tech skills that are commonly used specially if you are a product manager in a digital product-based organization. What I won’t discuss in this article, is the deep dive of these technical skills, I will only suggest what all one can study for a healthy start to a PM career ✍️  

❗️ But first, let’s ask do Product managers really need technical skills? But the problem is it is not a straightforward answer -

✔️ It depends on the type of product you’re working on. A product manager whose main product is around third-party services or microservices, will struggle to develop and maintain API products without knowledge of APIs.

✔️ It depends on your product lifecycle. If you are a PM at an early-stage startup, you probably will need a little more technical depth than someone who is working in a larger set up where you have multiple teams and stakeholders to bridge the gaps in technical understanding such as scrum masters and tech leads.

✔️ It depends on where you’re at in your product career. If you want to be able to influence your engineering counterparts at ground level, tech skills and knowledge will become a must-have.

💡 Some basic level skills that we all must have are:

1.       HTTPS + HTML/CSS

You may have heard dev teams talking about something happening on the client side or something happening on the server side. What’s going on here? 😕

Think of the client as one making the request to the web address you’re visiting. The client is your browser. Your browser, and the device you’re using, is making a request to a server somewhere (maybe on cloud!) to access a website. In fact, with some basic HTML and CSS skills, you’ll soon be able to make some live edits in the browser as well. ⚡️The next time you’re deciding what button color to use or font size on a landing page, your skills will come in handy.

👉 Many products are built with web technology, and it can be very useful to know how these pages are structured. This can be helpful in situations such as page alignment is inconsistent across the product, or the images aren’t rendered properly on a progressive web app screen and so on. One can use tools for product analytics or A/B testing with this background. When setting these up, it is usually based on the HTML or CSS elements that define the page so a basic understanding will go a long way.

2.       Technical Stack and Product Architecture

As a mobile product manager, you should be aware of what technology or tech stack is your product based on. Even if you are not responsible for selecting or building it, having this knowledge will make you a better member of the team. 📌 for example what language the code is in – front end and back end, which type of database structure you have, which microservices and APIs are being used etc.

The technical stack, and more specifically, the environment it is deployed to, impacts the ability to provide constant product updates to stakeholders.

💡 In fact a lot of times, I have been asked this question in PM interviews for FAANG companies as well. So knowing some basics on the tech specs that your product is based on, helps a lot!

Also, having an overview about your product’s architecture is crucial in a PM role. 🔨Every architecture decision will have pros and cons and will impact your product, customers and the company. 💲 Cost is another aspect of the product’s architecture.

3.        APIs

Now APIs is a topic that can earn you some real good brownie points from your tech guys. I can imagine a lot of times you must feel that engineering teams look at us product managers are merely ‘business guys’ and we can never become ‘techie’ in their eyes! ✏️ But of all the things, APIs are seemingly more and more important to product managers as APIs are one of the most frequent technical concepts referenced by non-product stakeholders because of the business opportunities they present.

Having a thorough understanding of which APIs your product utilizes and what capabilities they can offer to your users/clients is of paramount importance. Most products nowadays rely on APIs for interacting with other products/services for example Truecaller provides their APIs to apps for smoother onboarding journeys.

4.      Data Analytics/ SQL

A cornerstone of getting a feel of how your product is performing in the market is by creating and analyzing powerful data reports. And the chunks of information required are stored in databases. 🚩

If there is no tool that provides this data in a structured way, you need to have this technical skill. In these cases, either we force the developers to carve out time from their delivery schedules and give us this data or we find it ourselves, using SQL. In some organizations, there are dedicated data science teams (Frankly, I have been lucky so far!) and you can give specific events that you need to track at front end and they will have funnels ready for you..

✏️ If you don’t have such a department, creating GA funnels yourself and writing basic SQL queries to collect that data manually from data warehouse is your option. Best case scenario there are data mining tools that can be used to get the data in an easy way so that you don’t need to run SQL queries. There are many tool options, though they bear their own cost and learning curve.

In the end there is a plethora of technologies and skills that can build your product career ranging from basic product skills like agile, tech document writing, design thinking, roadmap development to technical and programming skills. You can choose to learn as many skills as you can carve the time for but having a basic knowledge of the above ones will catapult your career into greater heights.

😊 All the best!

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