How Tech Savvy Should Product Managers Be?

Establishing sustainable balance between business and tech knowledge

Should product managers know how to code?

How much do I need to understand software engineering to thrive as a product manager?

Can I succeed as a product manager without any tech knowledge?

Young and wanna-be product managers often struggle to find peace with such questions. If you’re wondering about it, you’re not alone. Allow me to extend a hand and bring some clarity to you.

During this episode, I will walk you through the following:

• The product manager job and its challenges

• How tech-savvy one must be to rock as a product manager?

• Finding the balance between tech and business

Let’s go through item by item with some stories and lessons from them. Hopefully, by the end of this piece, you’ll get the answer to the three initial questions from this episode.

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The Product Manager Job and Its Challenges

My first faulty interpretation of product management was bridging communication between business and tech. Coming from software engineering, I felt ready to rock the world as a product manager. I did my best to understand the wants of business and translate that into tech requirements. It worked until it didn’t.

Initially, I thought I was doing a good job. Software engineers knew what to do, and business could see the progress. Yet, I missed a critical part of my job: uncovering opportunities to drive value for the business and customers.

My tech background tricked me. I blinded followed what stakeholders wanted to realize later that wasn’t what users needed. After a sequence of failures, I had enough, so I decided to learn more about business.

It took me quite some time to accept that my role wasn’t to tell software engineers what to do. But to identify opportunities worth pursuing and align tech and business in the same direction. I stopped telling software engineers what to do and started telling them what we ought to achieve. That was a massive change.

I’d summarize the challenges of product managers as follows:

• Align business and tech in the same direction of what’s possible to achieve now

• Give enough context to tech teams, inspiring them to build valuable solutions

• Learn how to listen ten times more than you speak

• Master the art of setting goals small enough that teams can focus on

How Tech-Savvy One Must Be to Rock as a Product Manager?

I’m biased to answer this question, but I’ve worked with many non-tech and tech-savvy product managers. I cannot say one is better than the other, but I know side effects of both sides.

Non-tech product managers frequently struggle to guide software engineers. There are two variants I observe:

1. Block everything you don’t understand

2. Blindly accept anything you don’t understand

Both are equally bad. The first one diminishes the relationship with tech people. They will continuously complain that product managers don’t understand and make bad decisions, leading to an unmaintainable product. While the second will lead to a tech-driven product, generally taking only to create value because it focuses on the tech aspect instead of what matters for the product itself.

On the other hand, the tech-savvy product managers often had the struggles I mentioned in the previous part. They let business drive them and focus on building the solution right, though that may not be the right solution to build.

Over the years, from product manager to Chief Product Officer, I concluded that great product managers know how to connect the dots. I say that they have a nose for bullshit. They understand when something makes no sense for tech people and business. Let me give you a brief story for that.

From 3 Weeks to 3 Hours

Once, as a product manager of a CMS (content management system), I told our solution architect that users from Australia received a timeout whenever visiting our platform. Immediately, the solution architect said, “I told you last time. We had to invest more time into a scalable infrastructure. Now, I need at least three weeks to fix it. We will need to change our deployment strategy, load balancer, elastic search, cloud setup, and so on.” He kept speaking for a while, and I was sure we were talking about different things.

I had to help him reflect on the problem because the solution sounded over-engineered to me, so I asked, “Which problems are you trying to solve with this solution?” He promptly said, “You said editors get a timeout. So we need to ensure our CMS is available to everyone worldwide.” Then, I corrected him, “Users get a timeout. We don’t have editors in Australia, and we won’t have.” Then, he said, “In that case, I’d have a solution in a few hours.”

To thrive as a product manager, you must ensure that tech and business align with what you aim to achieve. Technical knowledge makes your life easier because you can listen to software engineers and know which questions to ask. Without tech knowledge, your brain will probably turn off once you are bombarded with tech jargon.

I don’t want to diminish non-tech product managers because they bring a fresh perspective that can enable outstanding solutions. But, I cannot deny the challenge of collaborating with software engineers without knowing how to align with them.

Finding the Balance Between Tech and Business

You will pay a high price when you cut corners to meet business deadlines. It’s probably more than you’d have initially invested.

When you build state-of-the-art solutions that create no business value, you’ll cause frustration in all layers.

The real challenge is choosing between build to learn and build to scale. The first means you lack evidence justifying a full-blown investment and the second, you have enough confidence to build it right from day one, which is highly unlikely.

You can make your life easier by having a deep business understanding and enough tech knowledge related to your product. This will help you push stakeholders back when they apply unreasonable pressure and enable you to guide teams to invest properly according to your confidence level.

In short, the product quality will probably suffer when you are extreme on business. And being extreme on tech, you will potentially create less value than possible.

Being a sound product manager is tough, but it's magical when you get it right.

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Wrap Up

You can succeed as a product manager without tech knowledge, but that will be harder. I’ve worked with great product managers without any tech knowledge, but they struggled with that and eventually learned the basics of software engineering.

Having tech knowledge as a product manager doesn’t mean coding at the same level as a software engineer. It means understanding how to connect the dots and ensuring a sustainable business and tech balance.

Without any tech knowledge, you will have a hard time unleashing your team’s true potential.

Main takeaway: Learn enough to understand software engineers so you can have a fruitful collaboration and create together what none of you could do alone.