What is Technical Product Management Anyways?

How to move along the scale of technicality in the world of Product Management

I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with a few really great product managers. As a start, great product managers need to be humble, empathetic, and flexible. PM’s need to have all of the soft skills and ambition to adjust to the mile-wide, foot-deep base of knowledge that it takes to fill the gaps that their team doesn’t realize they have.

Along with those soft skills, though, PM’s need to have a certain degree of proficiency with the technology that forms the foundation of the product they’re building. They need to get technical.

Technical Product Management involves the management of products of relatively high technical complexity.

TPM’s often have a different notion of who their users are. Often TPM’s have a mission of empowering others to more effectively serve users, rather than serving them directly. In fact, some TPM’s build products for use by other Product Managers.

With all that said, the notion of technical and non-technical Product Managers being a binary distinction is a myth. Every Product Manager requires some degree of technicality in order to be great at what they do, and their challenge is to figure out where…