7 Tips for Starting your Product Management Career without an Engineering Background
Add value to your team whilst getting to grips with software concepts
If you’re coming to product management from a non-engineering background, there’ll be times during the first few months where you’ll feel lost.
It can feel like you’re spending all your energy just trying to keep up with technical conversations. Rather than helping your team, it can actually feel like you’re slowing them down.
This is completely normal. I struggled with imposter syndrome in my first few months having transitioned from a law and business background. And most PMs I know had similar experiences.
My advice: you’ve got time to learn software concepts, so don’t let it bother you that you don’t understand everything right away. In the meantime, there are plenty of ways that you can add value to your team…
1. Discover your team members’ pain points
When I join a team, I try to organise a 1–1 with each member of the team to understand how they like to work and what their current pain points are. This guides me on where I should focus my energy in the first few weeks.
In my last role, several developers told me the lack of a roadmap made it difficult to plan and, as a result, their scope felt “bitty”. I prioritised creating a roadmap over the next few weeks.
This allowed the team to be more tactical in how they built things. It also helped me to think strategically about our team’s work in the short & medium term.
2. Use product discovery to become an expert on your customers
Whilst you’re still getting to grips with the ins and outs of software, a good way to add instant value to your team is to go all-in on product discovery 💡 This means interacting with your customers to inform which problems to solve and how to solve them. I recommend:
- Shadowing your customer support team to understand customers’ pain points and how the product currently fits into their lives
- Diving into your product’s historical data, both quantitative and qualitative (watching recently completed customer interviews on x2 speed is a favourite of mine)
- Working with your product designer on hypotheses, customer interviews, wireframes and mock ups. Try to involve individual developers early in the process and present to the wider team when you have something approaching final designs
If you’re proactive in product discovery, it’ll benefit both your customers and your developers, who will be grateful that the experience is well defined before they begin building it.
3. Connect your team to the impact they’re having on their customers’ lives
Teams can sometimes be so focused on the detail of what they’re building that they become detached from their customers and the company’s mission.
Reminding them of how their work impacts customers and helps achieve the company’s mission builds customer empathy and motivates teams.
My favourite method is playing clips 🎥 from customer interviews in all-team meetings, particularly those where customers commented on parts of the product that touched on the team’s scope.
I’d also recommend setting up a “north star metric” to track your team’s progress towards its goal. Make this visual and put it somewhere the team can see it moving. This’ll get everyone focused on the task at hand.
4. Leverage your unique perspective
When you’re unsure if your team is taking the right approach, your first instinct might be to think “I won’t speak up because there’s probably an element of this subject that I don’t understand” and let them crack on with whatever they’re proposing.
Instead, ask the question. You’re probably the only non-engineer in the meeting, so you’re bringing a different perspective that may help your team to see something they’ve overlooked.
Generally speaking, leaving your ego at the door in team meetings is a great habit. It’ll allow you to ask the “dumb” questions that’ll challenge the team and help you learn how things work.
5. Coach your team to give non-tech friendly demos
Unless they’re looking at a concrete feature, most stakeholders don’t understand what’s being presented in a demo. At my previous company, a cursory glance at the Zoom window during my team’s demo revealed that most attendees had zoned out and were doing other things 🥱 My team had become aware of this and put little effort into demos.
I started to coach my team in framing their work for non-tech folks. I noticed that stakeholders, for the first time, began to ask questions and congratulate the team on their work. The profile of the team lifted within the company and morale improved within the team.
What’s more, helping your team explain things in non-tech friendly terms has the added bonus of fast-tracking your own understanding of software concepts.
6. Build a close relationship with your tech lead
Your tech lead, being on more of a “managers schedule” than other developers & being more experienced probably empathises with the challenges you’re facing as a new product manager.
Show vulnerability by being honest about your lack of technical experience. Once you create trust, they can then be your “go-to” when you don’t understand a software concept or something the team is doing.
You’re both heavily invested in the team performing well and contributing to the company’s mission. So a smart tech lead will probably see the return on investment in bringing you up to speed.
7. Use these awesome resources to help you get a baseline of tech understanding 👇
As Justin Gage put it, speaking the language of your engineers helps build trust and improves communication.
For example, knowing the difference between APIs and webhooks would help in deciding which is best to solve a particular problem.
Here are some great resources which will get you from 0 to 1 in a few days:
- Technically — the best tech explainer newsletter out there
- One week technical PM — a decent paid course which provides surface level knowledge in a PM context
- Fireship — slick 100 second YouTube explainers
- Swipe to Unlock — a book which explains tech and business concepts with analogies
- Lenny Rachitsky’s recent blog post — producer of the best product content on the internet (subscribers only, but IMO worth it)
- Tech for PMs 😉
To sum up…
Don’t panic about technical concepts — you’ll have time to pick those up. Adopt a servant leader attitude and find areas where you can add value to the team right away. This’ll be a great platform for your first role and the rest of your product management career 🚀
