Coding != Technical: What It Means to be Technical as a PM

If anyone had looked at my resume before joining Cockroach Labs, they would have stamped me with a big red label: “non-technical.” Somehow…

If anyone had looked at my resume before joining Cockroach Labs, they would have stamped me with a big red label: “non-technical.” Somehow being technical has become a binary label — you’re either an engineer, or you’re not. If you’re an engineer, you’re technical. If you’re not, you’re non-technical. And we all know the baggage that comes with being non-technical.

When I first decided to join Cockroach Labs, a lot of my peers asked me if I really wanted to join such a “technical” company. Some of my engineering friends straight-up told me that they didn’t think I would be well-prepared to do the job. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m pretty bullheaded when it comes to making career decisions, so I went ahead and joined Cockroach Labs anyway. I’m constantly out of my depth, jotting down terms to look up after meetings, and being in a perpetual state of confusion. However, I’ve learned a couple very important lessons that help me focus on adding as much value as possible as a PM.

Lesson 1: You won’t be an expert until you figure out what to be an expert in.

I’m most often out of my depth when we start discussing a new feature or a new trend. I often haven’t spent the time to research the subject yet, and haven’t gotten the chance to develop an opinion on the subject. As a non-technical PM, it’s really easy to blame yourself for not having an opinion or knowing the answer to a problem when it’s first posed. However, it’s important to remember that no one knows much about new areas and new features anyway, even if they have a technical background. My approach to situations like this is to be upfront about what I know and don’t know, and suggest a follow-up a week later once I’ve had time to do some personal research.

Lesson 2: You need to be technical. Period.

Let’s be clear here though. Being technical isn’t about being an engineer or knowing how to code. You can be plenty technical without writing a line of code. As long as you can understand how your product fits into the industry and the trade-offs the engineers make as they implement a feature, you’re technical enough. I taught myself Java a year out of college, but I didn’t actually find that to be particularly helpful to me. Instead, another class I took about designing better code was way more helpful, since it discussed the trade-offs between different algorithms. Understanding these larger concepts are way more important than knowing how to code in 5 different languages, so it’s shocking to me how much weight people put on knowing how to code as a sign of technical aptitude. As a PM, I focus on building the conceptual understanding I have in technology over implementation.

At the end of the day though, I trust the engineers I work with to make the right technical implementation decisions because I add way more value when I focus on the following lesson.

Lesson 3: Your non-technical background is a strength.

After one of my first feature kick-off meetings ever (where we define what a feature should look like and why we are building it), I asked my team whether or not they got the information they needed. It became clear that what they really needed from me were 1) user stories / use cases, 2) competitive analysis / research, 3) customer insights, and 4) an initial recommendation of scope for discussion. The first 3 items can be successfully accomplished without any insight on how things should be implemented. They are all customer, business, and industry focused! That’s where having a non-technical background can actually be a strength, since you don’t get bogged down on implementation issues and can focus on the user perspective.

I’m about to hit my one year mark at Cockroach Labs, and I’ve had a hell of a ride. I’ve learned a lot, and there is still much more to learn! For those of you who are worried about whether or not you’re technical enough to be a PM, make the jump and learn quickly. After some time passes, you’ll turn around and realize that you’ve become more technical than you would have ever expected.