Day 115 in MIT Sloan Fellows Class 2023, Digital Product Management 5 - "How technical should PM be?"
Are you technical enough for "PM", "Developer" or CEO?
It is a frequently discussed question that the sufficient level of technical skillset for a good project manager. Should they dive into coding detail? Or is it OK to draw some power points to align with stakeholders?
In my experience, higher technical expertise in PM gives the dev team much more flexibility and agility. If the PM does not have technical expertise, every time dev team needs to interpret the business objective into technical tasks and get approval from the PM. PM can not judge whether the direction is correct or not.
So higher technical skillset would be great, but PMs need to be careful to avoid micro-management.
The important point is PM needs to start from high-level user demand and breakdown them into understandable chunks for the tech/dev team. Also, flexibly make a decision technically efficient and correct from a business perspective.
Good technical demonstration by PM
One of the remarkable examples of how PM leverages its technical skillset is this github chats.
Fundamentals of technical jargon
The following information is the minimum technical terminology you should understand as a product manager.
