Do Product Managers need to have technical background?

I was recently having a discussion with a friend about breaking into Product Management. The discussion was focused on whether someone who doesn’t have a technical background can be a successful and efficient Product Manager.

I had published a post earlier about how professionals from different roles have found their way into Product Management. Many Product Managers were engineers in their previous stints, and typically they transition into product management for the product they had developed. There is a reason for this — as engineers, they understand the architecture of the product and have already acquired knowledge of the domain and the user base their product serves. The learning curve is not very steep and they have already established a rapport with the engineering team, being one of them.

That being said, I want to explore in details about what advantages and disadvantages a Product Manager with technical background will have.

Let’s first talk about the advantages:

Of course, there are some pitfalls for product managers who come from technical background.

I believe that every power is a superpower as long as we don’t get distracted from our goal. Technical expertise is similarly an effective arrow in our quiver, as long as we aim for the right target.

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Sad because the world is changing.. “SAD” is published by Rodney Gainous Jr. in CodeSigned.