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How technical should one be if they are interested in being a Developer Product Manager?

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5 Answers
Developer Product Management
  1. Melissa Ushakov
    Melissa Ushakov

    GitLab Group Manager, Product Management • 3y

    As a Product Manager, you need deep knowledge of the personas you serve. To build great products for developers, you don't need to be a developer, but you need to understand their challenges, motivations, and day-to-day work. I encourage product managers to use the products they build so that they truly understand their users' experience. This means that product managers for developer products need to be more familiar with software than product managers for other types of products.

    1,889 Views
  2. Deepak Mukunthu
    Deepak Mukunthu

    Salesforce Senior Director of Product, Agentforce AI Platform • 3mo

    Should be technical enough to:

    • Understand API design, trade-offs, and constraints

    • Read code and reason about systems

    • Have meaningful conversations with engineers

    But you don’t need to be the best engineer in the room.

    What matters more is:

    • Product judgment

    • Empathy for developers

    • Ability to simplify complexity

    433 Views
  3. Aindra Misra
    Aindra Misra

    BILL Director, Product Management (Data, AI, DevEx, Identity) | Formerly Twitter/X • 9mo

    Developer Experience PM should be fairly technical as their customers are software developers. Unless you understand the overall Software development lifecycle (SDLC), you won't be able to make decisions on the products and tools you need to build. It does not mean that you should have a software engineering experience in the past, but you should learn atleast about the SDLC process.

    440 Views
  4. Julian Dunn
    Julian Dunn

    Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management • 2y

    Quite technical, because you cannot have the requisite level of empathy for the target user, not to mention be credible with your engineering team if you aren't. Now, I do think that a mistake that PM hiring managers for devtools often make is trying to optimize for specific knowledge in a particular domain (e.g. if you're an observability company, trying to only find PMs that already know monitoring/observability). This is unnecessary. What I look for are transferable technical skills: have the ...Read More

    634 Views
  5. Jeremy Glassenberg
    Jeremy Glassenberg

    API Strategist API Product Strategy Consultant | Formerly Box, Tradeshift, DocuSign, Deserve, Edmodo, Pinn.ai • 1y

    I assume by "Developer Product Manager" you mean a Product Manager who is focused on developer-facing Products, like APIs or infrastructure tools. I've worked in the API space for many years, and have trained people from a variety of backgrounds to become PMs in the API space. I find that these roles should require more technical knowledge than the average PM. In general, PMs need to have some skill in design, some skill in business, and some technical skills, in order to be effective (design a ...Read More

    244 Views

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