Question Page

How technical are you with any given solution you are working with the team on?

Julian Dunn
Chainguard Senior Director of Product ManagementApril 4

It can vary from not-terribly-technical to quite technical. This depends on how complex your product is and how much the nuances of that complexity matter to the user's success with it. As an example, GitHub Actions has sophisticated features like matrix builds for parallelization, required and reusable workflows, and others where the design, down to the structure of the YAML, matters a lot to the end user. But even in Actions, these are corner cases.

What's important is that developer product managers not be afraid to dive as deep as necessary into technical details. Now, 95% of the time, do they need to be reviewing engineering design documents with a fine-toothed comb? Largely not, assuming that their partnership with engineering has been going well, and also that engineering has enough empathy about the end-user to make the right call even at a low level of detail.

1050 Views
Top Product Management Mentors
Tanguy Crusson
Tanguy Crusson
Atlassian Head of Product, Jira Product Discovery
Katherine Man
Katherine Man
HubSpot Group Product Manager, CRM Platform
Lexi Lowe
Lexi Lowe
Hex Head of Product
JJ Miclat
JJ Miclat
Zendesk Director of Product Management
Jesse Tremblay
Jesse Tremblay
HubSpot Director of Product
Victor Dronov
Victor Dronov
Atlassian Group Product Manager, Trello Enterprise
Sacha Dawes
Sacha Dawes
Flexera Vice President Of Product Management
Mike Flouton
Mike Flouton
GitLab VP, Product
Reid Butler
Reid Butler
Cisco Director of Product Management
Bryan Dunn
Bryan Dunn
Nextiva Head of Product, Developer Ecosystem and Experience Cloud