Technical Fluency for a Product Management role

Jozzire Lyngdoh

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Published in

Product Coalition

5 min readOct 22, 2019

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(Including a 4-week crash course for the technical round of a Product Management interview)

Product Managers are responsible for what is being built (and when/why), and not directly responsible for how it is built. Most product companies have aligned to the view that Product Managers do not necessarily need to have coding experience to perform well in a Product Management role, but they do need to have ‘Technical Fluency’ — which is basically the subset of skills that a Senior/Lead Software Engineer would have that are highly relevant to a PM role.

Technical Fluency for a PM can be distilled down into 7 skills —

An understanding of how technology products and the internet infrastructure work — from the micro-level to the macro-level. Given a product, you should be able to explain the components and logic involved as well as how they fit together. (From CS101 to System Design)
An understanding of how to effectively write Product Requirement Documents or Concept Notes that are non-ambiguous and allow a developer to theoretically build out the product without more than the ‘single-line-answer’ type of clarifications on the requirements.
An understanding of the technical complexities involved in potential solutions being discussed, so that the trade-offs are made on the correct set of parameters and business constraints.
An understanding of the time it takes, or even better — a baseline acceptance and respect for the estimates given by the engineering team.
An ability to connect to the engineers on your team and establish a foundation of trust built on effective lines of communication. You should be able to address conflicts in a way that (usually) leads to consensus.
A focus on soliciting feedback and gaining “buy-in” from the engineering team on the product vision, roadmap, and specific implementations. A motivated and aligned engineering team is an absolutely necessary ingredient for building great products together.
Most importantly, an ability to defend product decisions with the right mix of data, research, logic, and empathy — thus ensuring that the engineering team respects you enough to consider you a valuable source of direction to the work they do and the impact they make.

How do you ramp up on Technical Fluency?

I found the following path to work well in terms of cracking the technical round of most PM interviews I’ve been a part of and consequently develop the right technical competencies usually exhibited by effective PMs. In this section, I try to cherry-pick the things you can complete in 4 weeks with about 4 hours a day of time since this is usually the prep time you’d work with for Product Management interviews. (Note- these 3 steps may even take 3+ months if you complete them with a focus on depth rather than breadth, or if you’ve not been exposed to tech as part of your current role). The points here are equally valid for folks looking to switch into their first PM role, or existing PMs looking to revise/learn stuff for interviews.

1- The micro-level basics (A CS 101 course)
I would recommend the highly engaging Harvard CS50 course. This is meant to be a 10-week course, but if you are short on time, you should be able to cover the highly relevant first 5 weeks' worth of lectures in 1 week. Also, learn basic SQL if you haven’t yet.

2- The macro-level basics (System Design)
I recommend Gaurav Sen’s entire Youtube channel. This should take a week

3- Build something that works
This could just be a basic weather check native app or a website that you can customize for a small store. This gives you a stronger appreciation of how products work and how different aspects of code and system design fit together within the framework and infrastructure of the modern-day internet. I would recommend this Codecademy course on building basic websites. This should take 2 weeks if you really rush through. Spend this time with heavy unstructured learning on the side, as outlined below.

Unstructured learning

As you go about the 3 steps above, you’d start building enough context to explore further. Make a plan to keep learning new things. You can structure your unstructured learning across 3 channels;

1- How your company’s products work?
Deep dive with engineers on how things work on the products you manage. Read the technical documentation. Ask questions and google/youtube stuff you don’t understand completely. This is even more relevant when you start managing a new product track or take on a new PM role. You can even reach out to devs or PMs in your network to see if they could help run you through their products.

2- Deep dive on certain topics
Pick a certain topic and formulate a 2-to-4 week learning plan (~4 hours a week) for the topic. Broad topics such as Neural Networks or Blockchain can lead you to more specific sub-topics and perspectives.

3- Read tech blogs on random (but meaningful) topics
If you’d like to interview and work at a company — or even if you love and respect the products they build — you should read their tech blogs. A few well maintained and easy-to-follow ones are blogs by Google, Netflix, Gojek, Myntra, Amazon and many others out there.

A side benefit to this chaotic learning path (mostly via Medium, YouTube, and Google) is that once you do start, you would apply concepts of “How to learn in an unstructured environment” — thus developing a key PM trait that will serve you well.

So go ahead and learn something new — every single day. It all adds up.

I’ll add (and periodically update) a set of links here that I’ve found helpful in understanding and ramping up on technical fluency across 4+ years of Product Management.

Technical Fluency for a Product Management role

(Including a 4-week crash course for the technical round of a Product Management interview)

How do you ramp up on Technical Fluency?

Unstructured learning

Written by Jozzire Lyngdoh