How much engineering knowledge do I need as a Product Manager? 🤖

When I started as a PM at Google in 2012, there was a requirement to have a Computer Science degree as a PM. This has since changed, and now the CS degree isn’t a requirement anymore. More and more successful product managers are landing in the role without a formal engineering degree. I’d argue that is a good thing, but the story isn’t that simple.

I am asked often whether or not a CS degree is important, and many candidates are anxious ahead of the technical interviews they might face when gunning for a role in big tech as a product lead. Below, I will outline my thoughts on how technical I think a PM needs to be, and how to evaluate if you need more technical knowledge. I will also give some practical advise how to acquire this knowledge without sitting through a dry and boring CS course.

What is it with the CS degree requirement of a PM, after all?

So, what is all that fuzz about anyways? As a Product Manager you are mostly concerned with the user, and their needs and challenges, and how to solve them effectively. Why would you need a CS degree at all to be good at this job? There are a couple of reasons:

• Your main partner in creating solutions are engineers. And ideally there is overlap in terms of knowledge between you and your lead engineer. This can make the difference between an ok product, and a great one.
• You are asked to weigh in on options where a key dimension will be engineering complexity. Fo you to make smart tradeoff decisions with finite resources, knowing a thing or two what drives (engineering) complexity is incredibly valuable.
• As a PM in software, we fundamentally work with engineering products. Software isn’t furniture. It is complex, and the sources of complexity come from specific places. Understanding those places, and the components involved, will give you a leg up in terms of being a better leader of the x-functional team.

So, there is some legitimate reason behind wanting to have what I’d call ‘engineering literacy’. It is simply painful (for both parties, engineering and product) to have zero overlap (or even a gap) in that area. But is there a hard and fast requirement for a CS degree? Seems big companies like Google and other have changed their mind on this one.

What is ‘engineering literacy’ and how much of it is required for a PM?

Strong leaders who work in tech seem to have a strong affinity to engineering and the topics associated with it. Let’s look at some examples:

• Elon Musk, the cofounder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla has a degree in Economics and Physics.
• Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has a degree in metallurgical engineering from IIT and a MS in materials science and engineering from Stanford.
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, is a self described ‘hacker’ who started coding early on. He studied psychology and computer science.

There are no stats how many PMs I worked with came with an engineering degree versus not, but I have to say that one thing I did observe (including at Goldman Sachs): the areas we work in as Software PMs become increasingly technical. Meaning, there is simply an angle to explore in almost every option that has to deal with some form of engineering / technical aspect. So in some ways, the tech knowledge seems to be more relevant than ever if we only look at sheer presence of the topic. Having said that, the part that is also true is that tech as an overall parameter in decision making might decline in importance, relative to the importance of other aspects, such as inclusiveness and privacy, for example.

Where I am going with this is that the footprint of the relevant aspects of the product you work on might be an important factor to consider. Say, for example, if you started in ad tech 10-15 years ago, there was little consideration paid to privacy, and the scalability of the digital ad channels were what drove most decision making. Now the tide has turned. Being compliant with ever tightening privacy rules seems to be a much more important aspect. No surprise then that companies such as Google have loosened the requirements for new PMs on the engineering / CS degree front.

What does all of this mean for aspiring PMs?

Personally, I still believe in the idea that as a software PM we need to deeply understand the technical / underlying ways things work. There might be folks out there that disagree. I have lived through the Great Depression, not just as a bystander, but while working at Goldman Sachs. At the time, and there seemed to have been a ‘we don’t care what is in it as long as it works’ attitude by some. This led to the near collapse of the financial industry. Building software might not have a similar potential for impact, but then again, when you think of topics such as AI and Crypto, maybe it does.

When you are an aspiring PM, or look to break into Product Management, the topic of engineering competency is a critical one, and I would pay special attention to it. I would even recommend to leverage a ‘skill analysis’ tool to try and understand the footprint of your current fluency with engineering topics. This way, you could identify gaps you might have and look for options to close those gaps.

Overall, I have never seen a PM fail because they didn’t know what a hash function was, or how to estimate complexity of a small program. These things are simply ways to establish whether you know a little bit of general topics. But I interviewed a PM once who didn’t know what an A/B test was, and how it worked, and how the A/B test was different from an observational metric. It was a reason to question the ability of the individual for the role at a place which is as data-driven as a big tech company. Also, the difference between causation and correlation is a key ingredient for a PM, as it is the worlds leading way to avoid all kinds of biases. This, in turn, can lead to a fairer decision making, and a more balanced way to take risks, which for someone who had a front row seat to the credit crisis is a great thing.

Simple questions you can ask yourself and actions you can take

Ask yourself ‘What is an A/B test, and how does it work?’. And then, ask yourself ‘Why is an A/B test better than a simple metrics I can just observe?’ Try and go deep on those questions, and bring yourself to answer them deeply, and completely. Then find some more questions you might wonder about, i.e. ‘What is a Database?’ and ‘What different types of Databases are out there?’. These basic questions give you an idea of the level of engineering literacy that a PM will encounter on a regular basis.

To be clear, no one ever asked me what Database types are out there in my day job. But the characteristics of different database types (whether they are optimized for long complex queries, or for simple transactions and speed) I encounter almost daily.

Another path which I think can be useful is to find products which solve a problem leveraging a specific type of technology and try and dig into the ‘why’, and ‘how’ deeply. Look for a product which leverages AI in a smart way, and is successful with it. Ask ‘how’ they are doing it, and dig in. Ask ‘why’ they are doing it to understand the product angle on the use of tech. This can be super useful and a more engaging experience. This way you will collect questions that are way more fun, and way more useful to answer. A great place for this is Crypto right now. Ask yourself: how doe sCrypto mining actually work? Why do they need a specific type of chip for it? What else is this type of chip used for? And you quickly get into an area where you build up some good questions to explore.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📚 To learn the foundations of Product Management, I recommend reading INSPIRED by Marty Cagan. Marty has been leading the Silicon Valley Product Group for over two decades. His work is foundational for Tech Product Managers – a must read.

📚 To be really impactful as a tech PM, one needs to be technically fluent. The book How to Speak Tech, by Vinay Trivedi touches upon internet hardware, software, system design trade-offs and upcoming technologies such as AR/VR, all explained in simple terms.