Product Manager’s Tech Skills

A lack of technical background can be a blocker in the career. Understanding of the technical part of the product allows you to take full responsibility for the success of the team, to faster the pace of work and win teams trust.

In FAANG, 60–70% of product managers have their first education in Computer Science; their technical skills are tested on interviews.

What skills should a PM develop?

1/ Basis: how your website/app is working, what parts it consists of, frontend/backend.

2/ Scaling, Data Partitioning, the difference between relational and non-relational databases, its structure.

3/ The API and application microservices work; the main frameworks for development.

4/ Machine Learning Basics

5/ Distributed systems, Load balancing, caching. If you work closely with developers and are involved in releases, then be aware of what is Version Control and Git

6/ How releases work: Production, Staging, Master.

7/ Computer science: data storage structure, stack, queue; algorithms: search, sorting, etc. What developers face every day.

8/ SQL — the ability to write database queries.

How long does it take to explore this? Do a Deep Dive: For 1–2 months you focus on figuring things out, and then you maintain your knowledge by updating it every six months. You will spend 30–40 hours of your life, but the ROI that the company and the team gains will increase over time.