How technical do you really need to be, to be a product manager?
by Shobhit Chugh
She was a good candidate for Product Management. Had all the right skills: Strong customer empathy, good leader and influencer , detail-oriented, was able to drive decisions with data, good sense for Product decisions in general. But there was a mental block she had that I had to help her overcome: about being ”technical enough”. Probably the #1 question I get from people looking to transition into product management is “Am I technical enough?” For some reason, we have over-indexed on this one skill that product managers need to have. Let’s instead dig deeper into what being technical means, what you actually need to succeed as a product manager, and how you can start acquiring some of these skills.
Where can being technical help?
There are four aspects of Product Management where being technical enough can help. These are:
Being technical enough to have credible conversations with customers
Having the technical skills to do your job
Interacting with engineers
Imagining the possibilities
Customer conversations
This is the one place where I insist you must be technical enough as your customers. You must be able to have relatively detailed conversations about what your product does and why it does it. You should be able to understand your customer’s workflows and figure out where your product fits in, and what could be done to improve the workflows. If you don’t understand the domain because you are not technical enough, then you are losing out.Hence how technical you need to be, depends entirely on the domain. If you manage a hotel search product, you need less technical chops than let’s say if you managed a developer platform.
“I think that the need for a product manager to be deeply technical is often overstated. In many cases, it's a ‘nice to have; not a "must-have". The most valuable thing that a product manager does for an organization is making sure the right work is being prioritized in the right order. In most cases, to do this well, requires the product manager to be just technical enough to really understand customer needs. If you're building an email marketing product, for example, you need to really understand how the marketer will use the tool, what their needs are, how email marketing works, etc. This deep customer knowledge is much more important than a technical understanding of web or email systems. Hopefully, you’ll have an engineering team with technical expertise in those areas! Secondly, a product manager needs to be technical enough to test and use their own product, and to use analysis tools such as reporting dashboards, but in many cases, this won't require serious technical skills like SQL. The key is to pick a product area where you feel comfortable that you can really understand the customer's needs. If that's the case, you're likely technical enough to do the job.” - said Will Eisner, Former Director of Product at Tripadvisor.
Doing the job
Making decisions with data is key. And sure you can leave this job with the analysts, but should you? Analyzing data has a strong technical bent to it, and you should be able to
Layout your hypothesis
Figure out what data informs key decisions
Extract the data and transform it into a format that can help you make those decisions
Put data collection mechanisms in place for the future
And so on….This is the second dimension of being technical; being able to do the job and run enough data analysis so that you can be effective.
Interacting with Engineers
For most people, this is the first concern. I put it almost last intentionally.There is a belief that you need to be technical in order to be credible to have conversations with engineers and to be able to participate in good discussions with them. While it can be advantageous to be technical, you are likely solving the wrong problem! If being technical is the way you get to interact with engineers, you are likely not building a trusting environment in the team. So don’t try to be technical; instead, work on improving your team culture, and ask better questions.
“One of my favorite things I’ve heard about product management is ‘don’t be afraid to be the dumbest person in the room’. Obviously, PMs have their own unique set of skills, but in most cases, you won’t be expected to have the technical understanding of an engineer or the design qualifications of a UX designer.
Oftentimes, I find that being less technical when working with engineers is actually a benefit. Unless you work on a very technical product, it’s likely that if you don’t understand something, your users aren’t going to either. Asking lots of questions about how something works and having engineers explain them to you in terms that you understand can help them identify issues that they didn’t see before. “Engineers are normal people who have normal conversations, but they can sometimes get stuck thinking about the code more than the user experience, which is why having conversations with them in non-technical language can give them the lens they need to make the most user-friendly product.” said Emma MacDonald, Product Manager at Lose It!.
Imagining possibilities
This is an often overlooked aspect. As PMs, we are constantly re-imagining the future. And one question you must be able to answer is - what is possible given changing technology? What could change in the next two to five years that would make current customer problems easier to solve, or even irrelevant? For this, you must be technical in the sense of being able to understand what technology and current trends imply for the customer workflows.
Summary
To summarize, I would not let a lack of technical skills be a deterrent for anyone to become a product manager. Instead, I recommend that you find a product that works well for your to manage given your level of technical proficiency, and then build the right skills to do your job, be able to better interact with your engineering team, and imagine the possibilities for your product’s future. Don’t get overwhelmed by a lack of technical skills; build the specific capabilities that you need.The world needs more product managers who are customer-focused, have awesome business skills, emotionally intelligent, and leaders can complement the skills of the team, rather than just be more of the same.
About the Author
Shobhit is the founder and CEO of Intentional Product Manager, a revolutionary coaching program for product managers. He also serves as the Product Manager at Google for Crashlytics, which is used by most mobile apps to track and fix crashes. He spent several years as a Startup Founder, Product Lead and Engineering Manager, and two eventful years as a McKinsey consultant. He loves to make dad jokes, which are not always appreciated.