Technical Skills for Starters in Product Management

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Product Management has become a popular career path among fresh graduates and professionals in the digital industry. As startup companies have risen in the past decade, the role of a digital product manager has gotten more attention than before.

Source: atlassian.com

The figure above implies that working on digital products often requires coordination between the UX/UI, Tech, Business, and Product teams.

An entry-level product management talent tends to focus on execution and spends more time with the tech team. This interaction involves discussion around product architecture, technical functionality, user behaviour, and presentation of the product/feature. Therefore, as a PM, you will hear and use some technical terms, whether you are ready or not.

The question that I often receive from peers and aspiring PMs is:

“Does coming from a non-technical background hinder someone to succeed in a product management role?”

By saying non-technical background, I am referring to a background with no involvement with tech stack and coding.

I believe the below statement from “Escaping the Build Trap” to be helpful in answering the aforementioned question:

“A product manager is a tech-literate, not a tech fluent.” — Melissa Perri, on Escaping the Build Trap

As a product manager who works hand-in-hand with software engineers, technical discussions are inevitable. Always remember, to succeed, a product manager has to effectively communicate the product vision to the team — and engineers are part of this team.

Someone with a tech background who possesses the ability to communicate fluently with software engineers would have an advantage, this someone can grasp the technical complexities of products and foresee technical blockers.

Here are some of the perks of being a tech-literate product manager:

1. Asking relevant questions to the engineering team
   Sometimes, you find that your feature/product is not working correctly due to bugs or errors. Having decent knowledge about the stack and code enables the product manager to address relevant questions to the engineer. On some occasions, you can even participate in brainstorming the technical solution when you have enough technical knowledge.
2. Writing a proper technical specification
   Every product manager has a set of (usually short) timelines to build and get the product out the door. If you are familiar with technical stuff, you can optimize development time by writing a proper technical specification document. Having well-written documentation enables the engineer to grasp your idea and craft it for you without consuming too many alignment sessions.
3. Having higher confidence
   A great product manager is also a good storyteller. You are not only aiming for a VP of product to buy into your vision, but to get the engineers to buy in as well. Displaying a high grasp of the technical elements of the product to your engineers can boost your confidence level while you are trying to convince them. Furthermore, you can provide a rough timeline estimation of the product/feature delivery or gauge technical capability for some business requests that come across during a meeting by the business team or other stakeholders, making you a helpful counterpart to the other stakeholders.

In a nutshell, having an understanding of technical things like UX wiring, software development, and data manipulation will help a Product Manager to communicate, problem-solve, and coordinate with the team.

You don’t have to be a master of writing code or designing the web, but you should have enough understanding to help your team grasp what exactly you want to build or solve.

What are the common technical things you need to know as a digital Product Manager?

Now if you want to devote some of your time to learning and understanding technical skills, here is some guidance to start you off:

1. Product Architecture

Learning about product architecture will help you profoundly understand each layer of your application and how each part integrates with the other. For instance, if you are a product manager of e-commerce apps, and you want to build an app where users can see and buy the product. Your application will comprise the following layers:

• Front-End or the presentation layer for users to interact with the apps. It shows the product catalogue, text, image, button, field, animation, etc. on the user screen.
• Back-End or the logic layer or the “input-process-output” layer. Here is where you put the logic, instruction, or behaviour. For example, when users buy one book in your apps, the Back-End layer will run the instruction to deduct the quantity of that book by one and send the remaining amount in the inventory to the front-end layer to show it on the user screen.
• Data Layer where you store any related data of your application — for instance, the user data, seller data, transaction data, inventory data, etc.

Understanding your product architecture benefits you in designing your product functionality and writing your technical requirements. It also helps tremendously when figuring out bugs or errors.

There are other approaches to learning product architecture in the market (e.g. client-server architecture), so talk to your Engineer Lead for a proper start.

2. Performance measurement and data manipulation
Every product manager needs to continuously keep an eye on their product metrics for further decision-making. In some companies with a lean team, sometimes it takes product managers to do performance measurement and data manipulation themselves. Hence, data manipulation skills help product managers in providing data, as well as help to pick the right dataset to be gauged as the North Star Metrics.

You can learn SQL (Structured Query Language), a ubiquitous tool for manipulating raw data into a more readable and useful form. A great product manager won’t jump to a conclusion without any lighting from data, so possessing data manipulation skills can avoid product managers to make groundless decisions about the product.

3. API
API or Application Programming Interface, you could find plenty of resources that lecture about it (e.g. Understand API). API is the library of the function and behavior of your product or feature. API is consumed not merely by a single application, but also by other systems/apps internally or externally.

I highly recommend you have a deep understanding of API, as you are undoubtedly going to deal with API in the product development phase.

During your time exploring those skills above, you might be exposed to other technical things around. Don’t stop, instead continue to explore as many as you can because the more you know, the more comfortable for you to communicate with your team.

Thanks for reading 😁