[tristor]

Hard agree with this take. Also, a good PM should be technical enough to really understand not just how customers use the product but how the product works. you should be able to be the designated person to answer a question from customers when nobody else knows the answer. In my role as a PM, I'm usually the person the buck stops with for Sales, Support, Solutions Engineering, et al. You can't do that if you don't actually know how anything works, which I see way too much with other PMs in this industry.

[pseudosavant]

As a PM, you unlock a lot of value by getting engineers out of a lot of these meetings, by being technically competent enough (for these contexts) to not need them 99% of the time. It isn't even just about the devs' time either. It is about their focus and reducing context switching too.

[llamaLord]

100% agree. This is the biggest debate I have with other PM's who say "you don't need to be technical"... Total bullshit.

You're expecting to be able to engage with your engineering team around the relative effort and complexities of different technical solutions... You're gonna need to have an understanding of the underlying technical details.

The way I see it, I don't necessarily need to know how to build the thing (as in, all the implementation details). But I absolutely need to know how the thing we're building works, what all the key moving parts are, and how they relate to each other.

Without that, there's no way I can develop any kind of intuition as to what is and isn't possible, which is CRITICAL when managing expections with customers or internal stakeholders.