Tell Me About Your Technical Skills: A Non-Technical Product Manager’s Approach
I needed a moment to develop a response after the recruiter looked at me and said, “Tell me about your technical skills.” Sensing her sparse technical background I struggled to make my experience relatable. I decided to start with the basics by focusing on my experience connecting customer-facing products to internal systems via APIs. In retrospect, I did not answer the question well. My tactical response told her nothing about my passion for technology that simplifies users’ lives. Hopefully this article helps other product managers avoid my major mistake.
Over the past few months I have been searching for a non-technical product manager role. The combination of business knowledge, customer experience, and technical capabilities makes product management a highly variable field. This variation can be intimidating. At first, I dreaded interactions with recruiters. My dread dissipated as I expanded my own understanding of product management through networking with nearly 100 product managers and directors, reading countless job descriptions, and surviving several interviews. Through this experience some interesting attributes of “good” product managers have emerged.
Profiling Good Product Managers
Everyone seems to agree that good product managers have a thorough understanding of the business in which their products operate. Good product managers are also impactful cross-functional team leaders. When it comes to customer experience, good product managers have the customer focus to define user needs through some combination of market research and user testing, then influence product design and development to meet those needs. But what about technical capabilities?
I have been frustrated by the variation in technical capabilities amongst good product managers. On one extreme good technical product managers are experienced programmers or software engineers. I am not a software engineer by trade, so I avoid these roles and target non-technical product management openings. But, even non-technical product management roles sometimes call for specific technical experience. For example, many companies are explicitly seeking product managers with Amazon Web Services experience. Other non-technical product manager job descriptions don’t even mention what product you will be working with, let alone the technical systems products leverage. This variation makes it difficult to determine technical capabilities of good product managers. But three things about good product managers and their relationship to technology still stand out:
- Good product managers have a basic technical understanding of their products
- Good product managers are excited to learn more about the technical nature of their products
- Good product managers are aware of the technical goings-on and trends in their industry
Understanding the Product
Good product managers have a technical understanding of their products. This includes understanding the product’s stack, system architecture, data models, and APIs well enough to explain the product to others. We often explain a product’s technical functionality to non-technical audiences. That’s why non-technical recruiters often test candidates by asking them to talk about their technical skills. If you cannot translate your own technical skills for a recruiter, then you cannot perform a major job function.
Conversely, backlog and tradeoff management require enough knowledge of the product’s inner workings to explain business and customer needs to the development team. For example, we are often faced with tradeoffs between developing a new feature or fixing bugs. New features and bug fixes are equally important to the business, but development teams often only have time to complete one task before the next release. A good product manager will articulate where the bug and proposed feature each lie within the stack, and how they impact other systems. They will know if the bug and proposed feature’s location and data flow create dependencies on personnel outside of the development team. With knowledge of technical dependencies, business needs, and customer impacts the product manager can work with development teams to prioritize tradeoffs.
Curiosity > Knowledge
Good product managers do not know their product’s complete technical details on day one. Even internal hires need time to understand the full breadth of a product’s stack and system architecture, let alone each API and the role of connected systems. For this reason companies should focus on identifying product manager candidates with a zeal for learning.
Good product managers know what they don’t know and are excited to learn about it. They have a basic familiarity with technology and are curious to understand how a product works. But their attitude has more impact than their knowledge. Good product managers are eager to learn and proactively ask others for help. They often spend their first weeks on the job seeking out engineers who can explain the product as a system.
You don’t have to be an on-the-job product manager to proactively learn. It has never been easier to develop technical skills outside of work. Good product managers will expand their understanding of stacks, system architecture, data models, and APIs through self-guided learning located all over the internet. If you need a little more structure, try classes at a community college or General Assembly.
Industry Impacts
Good product managers are aware of the technical goings-on and trends in their industry. Interpreting pros and cons of industry-relevant technology helps them identify options. Is Salesforce exploding across your industry? If so you should boost your understanding of the platform and seek some hands-on experience. Is your company trying to migrate to the cloud? Then you should seek to understand basic cloud architecture and how it may impact your product’s systems architecture and data model. Understanding technical trends and their impacts helps good product managers influence great business and technology decisions.
Some industries and products are simply more technical than others.
Product managers in technical industries need to cultivate more in-depth understandings of trends. This reality is the root of variation in technical capabilities amongst product managers. Some industries and products are simply more technical than others. For example, fintech requires product managers that possess robust technical knowledge beyond that of traditional banking product managers.
Widespread digitization means that all product managers must have a baseline technical knowledge. The differing pace of digitization across industries, and even products within the same industry, means that some product managers must have deeper technical knowledge than others. That said, we all share a need to adapt new technical knowledge through our careers as digital advancements and technical trends continue to reshape our environments.
Take Two: “Tell Me About Your Technical Skills”
This rather simple observation profoundly affects the way I talk about technical skills. I no longer attempt to describe my technical capabilities. Instead, I begin by describing learning a new technology. Then, I briefly discuss applying my new knowledge. This approach greatly improves my conversation with recruiters and hiring managers. Non-technical recruiters find discussions that start with learning more relatable than application alone. Additionally, hiring managers perk up when they hear about technical adaptation. Using an interviewer’s technology-related question as an opportunity to explain how you learn and adapt to change should help any product manager ace an interview, no matter what level of technical skills are required for the job.
