What level of technical knowledge does a PM need to have?
Jan 26
8 Comments
I'm currently in an internal tools team in a non-tech product management role. I have an incredible manager and I love the people in my team as well as the company, but I think I'm missing out on some important learning. I'd eventually want to move to working on a customer facing product some day.
I'm wondering if there is a standard know how that a PM must have to collaborate with engineers, or if it just depends on the tech stack and product the team works with.
What can I do to fill this gap? How do I ensure my long term prospects remain solid? Am I overthinking this?
I'd appreciate any tips from experienced PMs
comments
The one thing I will say is, if you have a technical background and are a PM, don’t fall into the trap of accidentally architecting solutions when you talk with engineering.
That said, I think that’s often why PMs get a bad rap from SWEs because they never had to actually deal with the implementation so they don’t have empathy for the position of SWEs and/or trivialize the work.
If you’re a PM for a more engineering focused area (say a telemetry platform or ML or whatever) then, yeah, you need a tech background.
FWIW most PMs at Meta don’t have tech backgrounds as far as I’ve seen. There are some of us but not as common as some places. PMs at Amazon similarly tend to be more MBA types as well.
I do have a CS degree and I've built projects when I was in university, but they were never at the scale that big tech cos operate at, and the code was quite slapdash. I deeply empathize with SWEs and want to account for the bad rep you mentioned. Is working on side projects a good bet? Reading certain books? Coursework, other resources?
I'd appreciate pointers if you have any.
I’ve heard that PM interviews have a round for System Design.