A Survival Guide for New Product Managers Without Tech Knowledge
Half a year ago, I switched teams within ParkBee to join the product team as the first and only software product manager. I had worked at ParkBee for almost two years in a customer success role. I had absolutely no experience in product, did not have any technology background and I had never worked with Scrum — and there was no one to guide me.
What I did have was a ton of enthusiasm for well-developed software products and a love for creating structure out of chaos. I also had lots of motivation to learn all there was to know about technology and product development — and I needed to learn a lot. With our team of three developers, we’ve come a long way from a bunch of people with a lack of vision to a product team with a collaborative goal, and clear focus on product features that are aligned with the company vision.
So, if you have just landed your first product management job in a small company, if you have no technical background, and you need help: here are my tips for getting started!
Find mentors outside your company
Learning from other people that have gone through similar challenges and have learned from it is undoubtedly one of the fastest ways to learn new skills and skip some common trial-and-error stages. But if you’re like me, and you work in a small startup, that can become almost impossible within the company.
If you do not have a mentor inside your company who can advise you, find this person outside your company! Some of my colleagues recommended this to me, and I tried to find people in the same line of business within my network. Unfortunately, my network did not include any product management experts. If you have the same problem, ask your colleagues whether they have such people in their network so you can meet up with someone through them. At ParkBee, we have become quite good at connecting our colleagues to people in our own network to help each other grow, and it really helps us get new insights and tips for some problems that we come across.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
After talking to multiple product owners, managers and heads of product of other young and fast-growing startups it really gave me an idea of how other companies structure their product teams. Since then, we have implemented many things that they advised me. Not only is it very useful; talking to a like-minded person with similar interests is also super fun!
If you have trouble finding people in your peers’ networks as well, you can also join Slack groups or go to Meetups. I highly recommend going to a couple of meetups, where you can also meet new people to network with — it’s amazing how easy it is to find peers all over the world nowadays!
Never stop asking questions
I have a business background and had absolutely no idea about API’s, databases and coding. It is easy to become ‘numb’ to technical talk you don’t understand. Zooming out during meetings where developers start discussing the technical implementation of a feature can seem like a great idea — but it really isn’t. If you don’t have a technological background whatsoever, it is very hard to keep concentrating because you may only understand a fraction of what is being said.
However, I learned that putting in the effort to listen and to try to understand really pays off in the long term. I often felt like an idiot, but ignoring that feeling and just asking my colleagues to explain seemingly easy things really paid off.
Your team members will probably appreciate the fact that you are interested in their field. Bit by bit, you will be able to actually join some conversations and understand the sometimes complex impact of seemingly easy feature requests.
Learn to navigate your database
As soon as you can, set up a database management tool that gives you the opportunity to search through your company’s database. As I did not have any SQL knowledge, my colleagues helped me install and configure TablePlus, which has a filter option so you don’t need to know any database management languages.
A product manager I met up with recently gave me the advice to teach myself SQL. He said it would help me understand the database structure even better and this way I would be able to set up my own reports without having to rely on our company BI tool, which can sometimes not include all of the variables of your database.
“Learning to code” was always something that seemed incredibly complex but it was actually really fun! CodeAcademy has a great step-by-step free plan, so go check it out. The most fun is to immediately put into practice what you just learned and start using SQL for every search you do instead of using filters to search the database.
Become the tester
Testing is part of the development process, and in larger companies it becomes its own dedicated position. In a small startup with only few developers like ours, however, it will be part of someone’s job. If developer resources are scarce in your company and you have a high amount of feature requests (what PM doesn’t), one of the things you can do is to take on all non-development work from them, like testing.
In our team I started doing the testing as part of the ‘definition of done’ routine. Testing the stories have taught me so much about the development process and how our technology works. Ask your teammates to set up Postman for you if your company has an API. If testing is your job, it will immediately save you time during the demo phase of a Scrum sprint, as you’ve already ‘accepted’ the story before. Not only will this improve your understanding of what it takes to develop good software, it will also increase the quality as you probably have other cases that you test than the developers themselves. Plus, the more time you take to try to break your developer’s code, the less bugs will come bite you in the ass later on!
And also the designer
Design didn’t have much priority in my first months in the product team, but if it had it would have saved me a lot of time and misunderstanding between me and the developers. Sometimes I wrote a story and the developers interpreted the descriptive text entirely different, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth in the development stage. If your team does not include a designer, designing will naturally be part of your job as well.
Mock-ups — or wireframes — are a great way for PM’s to prepare user stories and make the user flow visual so that everyone is on the same page. If designing is not your cup of tea, definitely don’t bother to learn designing in Sketch or InVision — it will take you way too much time. There are, however, many UI / UX tools out there that have UI packs with pieces that you can put together and ‘design’ an example of what you had in mind with. I use MockFlow but there are many other tools out there, so find one that fits your needs.
“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.” – Deep Nishar, Vice President of Product at LinkedIn
Use a project management tool to find peace in chaos
Welcome to the world of product! It’s an amazing, diverse, exciting, fast paced environment. And it’s also complete chaos. You probably need help.
There are many tools out there; at ParkBee we use Asana, and I have become their greatest fan. It takes some time to get acquainted with any software tool and the more functionality it has, the harder it gets. If you don’t take the time to learn how to use it, you will be back to using paper to do lists before you know it. I really recommend putting in the effort to learn how to use your chosen tool extensively. Most software tools have their own ‘academy’, or even a customer success team that can help you out. Don’t forget to also download add-ons to your browser or desktop so that you can immediately turn that one idea into a task that you will order into a project later on.
Internet is your best friend
Google has been my bible. Starting off in my position without any colleagues with product management experience, I found myself wondering how to solve many problems on my own. There are so many people out there that write about their experiences though, you don’t need to look far. Medium is an amazing source of knowledge.
Really, I google anything I have a question about. Boring retrospectives? Want the product to align with the strategy? What is unit testing? Need to know how to define metrics to measure the success of your product? Google is your friend.
There are many articles about product management and tips on getting hired in a product role. Some articles advise you to start off within your own company, and I definitely agree with that. I don’t think I would have gotten the opportunity to start in product management at a new company, as I had no experience at all.
I hope these tips help you get started! The most powerful skill you will have is curiosity and a hands-on mentality. Top it off with some advice from others and an internet search-engine, and you will be able to get very far.
Thanks for reading! Are you interested in what we do at ParkBee? Read one of our other articles or check out our career page!
