🔧 Do Product Managers need to be technical?

Technical Skills for Product Managers

Do you need to be a developer in Product Manager’s clothing to be an effective Product Manager for a software product? No. But it certainly helps if you understand technology enough to have meaningful conversations with your product team. Here are some perspectives on how to get past the “know enough to be dangerous” stage with your technical knowledge.

Technology Skills for Product Managers. As with most things in life, the answer to the question of ‘how technical should product managers be?’ is ‘it depends’. It depends on the type of product you’re working on, your product lifecycle and where you’re at in your product career. While the depth of technical knowledge you should have as a PM depends on a variety of things, Richard Holmes describes the most useful technical concepts to understand when working with engineers.
(via @Deptofproduct)

How Technical Do Product Managers Need to Be? People often ask how technical Product Managers need to be. Do you need to code or have a computer science degree? No. You don’t need to code or have a computer science degree, but you need to know how your product team will develop software. The GettoPM team explains the technical skills you need to collaborate effectively with your product team.
(via gettoPM)

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New month, who dis?
Is it me, or did summer just whip right by? 

As I write this on September 2nd, I realize that summer isn’t officially over – but now that my kids are back in school… and especially after this upcoming long weekend, we are definitely in post-summer mode in our family. Now, it’s onto soccer games, hearing the high school band from my front porch on Friday nights, and (dare I say it?) making homemade pumpkin spice lattes. 

But as we start September, I want to remind you that every beginning of the month gives us a new opportunity. It doesn’t matter what went wrong this past month… or which projects you wanted to work on but never got to. Every new month is an opportunity to:

• Calibrate your product team so that everybody is on the same page. 
• Plan those customer visits you may have been putting off.
• Revisit your roadmap once more to make sure that everything is still relevant. 
• Commit to saying “no” when you need to. 
• Finding a way to make “yes” possible when it’s the right thing to do. 

It’s easy to get caught in the everyday rut of just… doing our job. But every so often, we need to give ourselves a kick in the pants. I think the beginning of every month can be that built-in kick in the pants that we need. 

So, enjoy your Labor Day weekend – you do deserve that. But come Tuesday, let’s let the calendar motivate us to be even better product people.

What do you say?

5 Technical Skills Product Managers Should Have.  Can you become a Product Manager without having a technical background? The short answer is yes. A successful product team has people from both technical and non-technical backgrounds. If you have a non-technical background, then you bring perspectives and thought processes that are valuable and rare in most software companies. Still, it helps to have a few technical skills under your belt to round out your resume and help you succeed in the world of web and software development. The Codeacademy team covers five technical skills you should have.
(via @Codecademy)

15 Top Technical Product Manager Skills. Technical skills are necessary to be a successful Product Manager because of all the technical aspects involved, such as programming languages and data analysis. However, soft skills are also essential because they help them work better with others on their team. Josh Fechter goes over 15 top technical skills for product managers and what each skill means.
(via the-product-company)

Technical Skills for Non-Technical Product Managers. One question Lisa Zhu gets asked most by prospective and junior PMs (especially those transitioning from business backgrounds) is what technical skills they need to learn. As someone who’s functioned in this role without a computer science degree or bootcamp certification, Lisa prioritizes building knowledge in six areas of technical knowledge.
(via @lisa__zhu)

The Top 5 Ways to Scale with Simplicity

It's hard enough to build the ideal product team. But what happens when you're faced with the task — and the entire team is fully remote? How does your approach change? Should you be looking for different skill sets and asking different questions? We'll dig into all of this and more in this interactive discussion. Plus, you'll have a chance to ask questions of your own as well!

1. A newsletter each and every Friday centered around an important product topic, like roadmapping, strategy, and analytics.
2. Access to a thriving Slack group with thousands of others to share advice, tips and get feedback on your work.
3. Plus, invitations to exclusive video chats, special member privileges at the conferences we hold in the United States and Europe, and more!