Being a software engineer is the only way to thrive in the tech world (and other lies I’ve told myself)

“If you’re not an engineer you need to find the people who will help you plot the technology path…and you just have to ask the questions.” — Meg Whitman, CEO HP.

There are more ways to thrive in the tech industry outside of learning how to code, but there is a misconception that you must have a software engineering background to really excel.

I have first hand experience here — I am a Senior Product Manager at a tech company. When I first took the position I did a lot of research on Product Management. Who is an expert in this field? What are the best books to read? Is there a best practice guide on being a Product Manager? When looking at the backgrounds I noticed a huge trend — most Product Managers started as software engineers.

But why? Why do companies like Google and Facebook require a CS degree to even apply for a Product Manager role?

What was interesting for me was that the origins of Product Management had little to do with actually being able to write software. In fact (although sources differ) most agree that the beginnings of the Product Manager came when Neil McElroy wrote a memo about ‘The Brand Man’ — or Brand Manager. While leading the Promotions Department at Procter & Gamble he found that he needed to hire a different type of role — one that would focus on the product, not the operations. The whole memo can be read here, but the major points are:

1. Study — study the brands history, the customers, the partners, shipping process, marketing etc.
2. Plan — figure out where the brand/product is weak and come up with a plan to fix it. Use resources needed and educate the sales team on the updates.
3. Take full responsibility — take responsibility for the brand/product as a whole — take from the shoulders of sales and operations.
4. Experiment — try things and make quick revisions.

Although I don’t know if Ben Horowitz read this before he wrote “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” — the similarities are clearly there. The most astonishing thing about this memo is that the job description isn’t that far off from a Product Manager today — even though it was written almost 60 years ago.

So what happened? How did we go from Brand Manager to ‘must be software engineer’? Well this is where I start to speculate. We know that Scott Cook went from former Brand Man at P&G to Intuit where he started to focus intently on the end-user, eventually being part of their Follow me Home project where employees went to a customer’s home to watch them use their product. Intuit is also the home of Bill Campbell — and if the name isn’t familiar, he’s the mentor for most of the product people who are familiar (Jobs, Horowitz, Schmidt, etc).

So I don’t know where it started — but somewhere between Scott Cook and today, Product Managers with a software engineering background started to become the expected. Based on all the research and requirements of a Product Manager today I don’t think it needs to be. If you can, as a Product Manager, earn the respect of the engineers you work with, know the customers like your own best friend, understand the product better than anyone at the company and know how to get the right tools for data — I think you can be a fantastic Product Manager. No coding required. If there’s anything I’ve learned from being a Product Manager it’s that knowing how to code is not nearly as powerful as knowing your customer.

I think the answer isn’t as easy as ‘get more people to code’ — maybe we can start seeing roles defined as technical in a different light. Maybe we can start with Product Management.

Protip: Learn SQL though — the ability to run queries is a superpower.