How to become a more technical Product Manager?

The day-to-day responsibilities of a product manager, as well as “being technical” requirement varies widely depending on the industry and size of the company, as well as the part of the product you work on.

If to review job descriptions for Product Manager role, you won’t often find Computer Science degree or a technical background as a “must have”. Nevertheless, most roles contain some sort of “being technical” requirement. These are some wordings from Product Manager job descriptions:

• Knowledge and understanding of user experience and technical application concepts
• Good technical aptitude and understanding of the mobile apps development process, methodologies and frameworks
• You have a strong understanding of technologies, architecture and the right way to build ecosystems
• Technical understanding of APIs and a shared platform architecture

So if technical degree is not mentioned as a requirement, what does it mean exactly to be technical enough for the Product Manager role, and what is more important - how to get there?

Below is the suggested list of concepts that should be within your technical reach as a product manager:

• The concepts of front-end and back-end
• The main differences between mobile and web in terms of product architecture and development
• iOS vs Android: impacts on design, rollout possibilities, app store submission rules, etc.
• Basic concepts of APIs and how they can connect different systems
• Basic understanding of the concepts of coding environments (staging, pre-prod, production), as well as branches and pull requests
• Data management and architecture concepts, understanding the basics of data storage, modelling, and dataflow
• Basic understanding of the cloud computing

Here are some of ideas where to start in order to get to “technical enough” stage:

• Take a course for product managers who need tech skills, like https://productdo.io/tech_pm. What is good about taking a course - it touches most of the topics expected from Product Managers to understand, there are lots of links to resources for further reading, plus you will save time by getting the distilled info all in one place.
• Get acquainted with Apple Design Guidelines where you can find lots of useful information in a structured way and totally free: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/platforms/designing-for-ios/).
• Learn Google Material design guidelines (https://m3.material.io/)
• Learn HTML or JavaScript to better communicate with front-end engineers - there is a free CodeAcademy course for HTML basics
• Learn SQL so you can do data analysis and better understand and measure metrics - there is a course on DataCamp on SQL that is perfect for starting out
• You can also read books that introduce the concepts and best practices of software architecture, like  Software Architecture in Practice (3rd Edition) by Len Bass, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman. Another great site with a detailed resource is Microservices.io by Chris Richardson.

By learning these skills and the technical language, you can earn more respect from the engineers in your teams and improve your strategic thinking skills. This strengthens your position in your product role and will make you a more successful product manager and build the best product possible with your team.