I Was a Non-Technical Product Manager Once

A common question in product management that always seems to come up is some flavor of: should product managers be technical?

My first job out of college was as a product manager working on B2B software. I was not technical. If you asked me back then, I would say it wasn’t an impedement.

Along the way I changed my mind.

I learned to code and that made me better at product. I started a company and that made me better at product. I did sales and that made me better at product.

It’s not the technical bit that makes you better—there are plenty of engineers that are not good at product!

Learning new areas like engineering, sales, operations etc. makes you more efffective. It increases your ability to reason about different problems. It’s increases your ability to work with different people, customers, and teams. It increases the set of solutions you can apply that is calibrated to reality.

So, should product managers be technical? Yes, but I think we get too caught up in the coding part that we forget it’s really about growing knowledge.