I want to be a Product Manager, do I need the technical skills?
This is a common question that I have received from my peer or colleague who is interested in product management field, but concerned about the required technical specifications. Well, my usual answer would be, if you’re planning to take on professional PM vacancies, definitely! There is no need for PM to get your hands dirty in the code for overall product management, but a PM need to know what you are talking about — especially in stakeholders meeting.
An architect doesn’t always understand how to build a building physically, but knows enough to be able to plan, design a solid sound blueprint for it, and then evaluate the construction. They need to consider how their ideas are turned into physical processes and the difficulties involved. The same goes for Product Manager. Product Manager needs to know how to turn their backlog into a product. Before a PM leaps into a backlog recommendation, it is crucial to understand the technical implications, challenges, and opportunities of the underlying platforms. Without necessarily knowing the code line by line, learning technical skills will benefit a Product Manager to know what’s going on inside the product or even understand the mechanics of the solution being developed.
Product Manager is not expected to know everything. The rule of thumb of a Product Manager is that if you know everything about the product or industry, then you should either be in a different position, develop another product, or start your own company. What Product Managers are supposed to do is leverage the team’s collective intellect to bring the final vision to life. Product Managers are entrusted with determining the purpose for the product. With that being said, it is necessary to consider the target market (the who), the problem and hypothesis (the why & what), and determine collectively how to solve the problem. Then leave the solution to the design and development experts.
Ok, I do want to learn more about these technical things, where do I start?
If you find yourself feeling out of depth in technical meetings or you just want to broaden your knowledge, you can teach yourself a great deal of information by taking online courses for software development, product creation, or even machine learning. The first essential thing to have is curiosity. You need to expand your technical curiosity by either take online course, talk with technical team, pay more attention, ask more questions in technical meetings and discussions, or attending technical events. You also need to build working knowledge in several areas such as software development process, high level product architecture, data analysis, prototyping, and technical estimates. You can ask your engineering teammates to sketch out the platform architecture and ask their opinion if there’s any strengths and weaknesses to note.
Here are some technical skills worth having in your toolbox as a PM:
- Technology stack
As a Product Manager, you should be able to identify which programming stack or technologies your company uses. PM also needs to be able to determine which stack is suitable for a product and even contribute to such discussions. Your engineering team is responsible for choosing a suitable stack for projects, but it allows you to consider your company’s stack choices, the purpose behind the chosen stack, and how well it fits your particular use case. This doesn’t mean you’ll be writing code for features to be released in production, but you’ll understand enough to ask good questions when engineers are discussing features, tech debt, and trade-offs to prioritize efforts versus user-facing features.
2. Product/Application architecture
There are several approaches in the market for product/application architecture. For Product Managers who handle web application products (e.g. e-commerce, online travel agent. etc), there are three key concepts to bear in mind when creating a web application. From the customer’s perspective, the application should be simple, esthetically pleasing, and address most of their problems. As far as business is concerned, a web application should remain in line with its product/market fit. From a software engineer’s viewpoint, a web application should be scalable, functional and able to withstand high traffic loads. All of these issues are addressed in the web application architecture.
Most web applications are developed by separating its main functions into layers, or tiers. This architectural pattern is called Multi- or Three-Tier Architecture:
Presentation layer — this layer is accessible to users via browser and consists of user interface components and UI process components that support system interaction. Three core technologies are used to build it: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Business logic/Business layer — this layer accepts user requests from the browser, processes them, and determines the routes through which the data will be accessed. For instance, if your application is a to selling groceries online, business logic will be responsible for the sequence of events a buyer will go through when buying groceries.
Persistence/Data access layer — it is a centralized location that receives all data calls and provides access to the persistent storage of an application.
Further understanding in this area will help you in designing product features and technical specifications.
3. API
API stands for Application Programming Interface. A simple way to think about it is to think about how you might interact with a typical product, which you would use a user interface. With APIs, there is no user interface, instead two systems talk to each other using programming interfaces. Currently, everyone uses an API. In terms of how business leverage technology to deliver value, retain agility, and leverage its own data, API is the current way to establish abstraction. There’s a slim chance Product Manager not working on such a product. It is worth studying further on how APIs are built, what webhooks are, client-server interaction and authentication protocols, how to package APIs into SDKs, data formatting, and what patterns of API gateways are.
4. Data collection, extraction, and analysis
We are living in the golden age of analytics. Understanding of where the data lives can lead Product Manager to a deeper knowledge of your product and its flaws. Product Manager should know how to obtain, extract, and analyze the data needed to prove a hypothesis. When any type of data is involved in the process, databases are used in every single aspect of it. SQL is the most common language used to manipulate data from a database. Learning SQL will show you how the data can be manipulated to get the information you need and how to interact with your database directly. It can help Product Manager to calculate related product results and set metrics, without having to involve technical team to obtain details needed.
How much technical knowledge is too much?
If you find yourself burdened by the technical decisions of your team, you need to stop because they are the subject matter expert. You can use your professional know-how to nudge the team such as asking questions in the grooming sessions: “Do you think we need more time to make logic simpler?“, “Do you think it will impact the system performance?“, or even, “Is it possible to create this feature this way?” Asking such questions would not only boost your skills, it will also make the team think twice before coming up with a solution since they know you understand the technical side.
In conclusion, there is no fast and hard rule to know everything about technology to be a successful Product Manager. Product Management and technical abilities have a relation that is relevant, but it is more into a nice-to-have connection. It certainly helps to do some technical research, technical baseline estimates and understand the reasoning behind the technical challenges, but it doesn’t stop someone from non-tech background to be a great Product Manager. The main key to be a successful Product Manager is to have a positive learner’s attitude and continuous learning. So, happy learning!
If you’re interested in applying for a full-time position or intern, Blibli is currently hiring! Send your resume to recruitment@blibli.com and get the chance to work with our PM and UX team and our own unique stories.
