How technical does a product manager really need to be to excel at their job?

Ever perplexed by the question, our small team of PMs set out to answer the age-old question … or to at least gather some data on the topic.

Earlier this year we sent out an anonymous survey to developers, QA engineers (also included in ‘developers’ in this article’s comparisons) and product managers here at New Work SE. We hoped to both get a good picture of what our developer & QA colleagues expect of us, and see how we see ourselves. The survey had 62 participants with more than 55% representation from engineering and around 34% from product.

Clearest findings

Most respondents considered security and testing to be essential for a product manager to understand. While it’s hard to argue against having products that are safe, secure, and free of severe bugs, the two are complex technical fields. It would seem counterintuitive to expect a PM to have mastery over either, let alone both.

Basic API knowledge was another easy choice for many* — a more reasonable expectation since communication between systems is close to describing the product behaviour itself.

Immediately recognisable from the survey results are also the areas that respondents deemed most irrelevant for a PM. Creating pull requests, reading and writing complex SQL queries, manipulating databases, and having deeper API knowledge were all dismissed by the majority.

We also snuck in a cheeky question: should a PM estimate the tickets themselves? We assumed this would get all ‘nos’ but 11% were convinced of the opposite. Surely a joke… right?…

* Editor’s note: perhaps proposing Basic and Deep API knowledge side by side in the survey was inadvisable.

Uncertainty in responses

Understanding DDD (domain-driven design) and TDD (test-driven design) were areas in which our respondents had differing opinions. Although 41% and 24% respectively consider either design type a part of a PM’s skillset, the majority was either unsure (32% / 37%) or outright disagreed (13% / 34%). Taking a look at the split between developer and PM answers for the DDD question, 24% of PMs compared to 9% of developers answered ‘no’. Answers to the TDD question were very evenly split across ‘yes’, ’no’, and ’maybe’. We were a little surprised here, as we anticipated the answer to be in favour of ‘not part of a PM skillset’ from a PM perspective when we created the survey, thinking TDD was too technical and clearly in the developers‘ domain.

When it comes to understanding the core algorithm of the application, developers’ opinions were also divided into thirds along ‘yes’/’no’/’maybe’. Whereas 38% of PMs thought ‘yes’ and 48% could not decide (‘maybe’). In hindsight, we could have done a better job formulating this question more specifically, as it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. However, with such a vast range of products out there, we believe this to be a very product-specific question.

The same picture is painted when looking at the ability to read simple SQL queries such as SELECT, FROM, WHERE, JOIN, LIMIT: the PMs tend to agree with this being part of the PM skillset (43%) with the developers stating the opposite (46%). Looks like we PMs think we can handle more in the tech department than the developers give us credit for.

Here are the responses in detail:

Technical vs. soft skills

We also asked our respondents to order some technical skills based on their perceived importance.

Over 60% discerned knowledge in agile methodology to be the most important tech skill a PM needs to have. In this case, both developers and PMs are aligned in their answers, so the PMs can take comfort in knowing that there is no mismatch in expectations.

It comes as no surprise that software development and data structures and algorithms skills are rated on the lower side. However, there is a slight mismatch on which one of these two is THE least important tech skill a PM needs to have. PMs think that software development is the least of their worries, whereas developers feel it should be data structures and algorithms.

The soft skills question presented a real challenge because, arguably, all the options the survey presented for ranking belong to any knowledge-workers toolkit. Appropriately, the answers, while still providing a clear outcome, are more evenly spread out than those for technical skills.

Communication was viewed as most important, followed closely by prioritisation skills. Emotional intelligence and time management completed the list Perhaps communication and prioritisation earned their spot at the top because these are less dependent on context and always required.

Which technical skills do you miss the most in your current product manager?

Looking at what technical skills the developers currently miss the most in their PM we discovered that references to a lack of technical skills do pop up. The most common missing technical skill was the lack of SQL knowledge and basic coding skills. However, to ease the pressure on the PMs a bit, 20% of the developers surveyed were happy with their PM and had nothing to wish for.

Conclusion

Even if technical knowledge is not perceived as an important skill of a product manager, it is definitely on the wish list of some developers. Who would not like to talk to someone who fully understands what you’re saying? Of course, it would be interesting to know if the developers we asked thought of a specific skill or situation when answering. To find out those answers we would need to take a deeper look… perhaps there will be a sequel to this analysis soon. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading — this article is the result of the joint effort of Ankita Srivastava, Antti Heikkonen and Svenja Lau.