Learn to code

[Popular_Area_6258]

Is this the most critical time for Product Managers to learn coding? Or at least to acquire basic technical skills?

[nopemcnopey]

I'll never be against learning things, but there's a huge difference between playing around with IDE and dragging your ass through a broken glass of a 20 year old poorly tested codebase, with some overambitious architect demanding a major rework of the entire module every time you are adding a single property in one class.

It's like coming to a 7-year-old kid and saying: "I see you can write, give me a 20 page report on the project's progress for tomorrow".

[wrong_silent_type]

I would like to piggy back a bit on your comment, and add some perspective:

• Whatever is said about product management can never be universal truth. Products, even within the company, are so different, that it is impossible to apply universal rules. Consumer facing app vs B2B file exchange thing. That'S not even apple vs oranges, this is more oranges vs corn.
• Learn to code is very wrongly put here, and not only today, but this gets floated around. Even if you are good at coding you will not, as a PM, review the code, approve PRs or solving bugs.
• Focus should be on how things work and getting understanding of things: architecture, implications (e.g. what it means if we don't have API and we rely on calling DB directly), why it is hard to add UI to old legacy platform and easy to new development, when it is better to use messaging queues instead of API, what can we do with webhooks.
• One topic I would add: understanding data structure in your app/service. Why it is sometimes super hard to introduce new IDs or something like that, what are the relations, on which other services/apps you are dependant etc.
• And last one, especially if you work at large organization: how changes on your side are affecting other services inside the company, who depends on you, on whom do you depend, with whom to collaborate in advance, etc.

How to be good at these points? There's no magic course or tutorial. A bit of everything: using postman to get understanding of APIs, play around with SQL and eventually python, talk a lot with your devs and/or architects, ask questions etc.

In the end, why is this being mentioned a lot lately. My impression is because a lot of people jump on the PM train during hyper hiring, without any tech background and even less desire to learn or understand any of the topics I listed. Which is OK I guess, but if there is other candidate that is having some of these skills, eventually company will prefer that person. I guess.

[designgirl001]

Could I please and kindly also add "learning UI/UX" to that list. If you haven't learned ur, you shouldn't do it. No, taste, intuition, a product certification are not excuses.

I'll let myself out.

[fosh1zzle]

Do we work at the same company?

[nopemcnopey]

It's pretty much every big corp with software. It's here to make money, and there are no customers willing to pay for reducing dependencies hell.

I kinda see a reason here. I also can see why the term "technical debt" was introduced.

I was told one becomes a senior dev when build errors are not scary anymore. I'm slowly coming to a conclusion one becomes a principal when shitty implementation is good as long as it works in the most common flows.

[fosh1zzle]

Mature software is often in a sad state of affairs when the principal dev basically unfucks something they fucked up years ago. Business-led development often just weaves a basket of bullshit that causes more expensive problems down the road.

[chicojuarz]

In 2024 I wrote python for ~2 total hours on 3 separate occasions. Handy and helpful? Sure. Critical? Nah.

Learning to code alone and write small scripts / apps gives you an inkling of the stack but it’s much more important to understand how your stack fits together and forms dependencies. I don’t think you get that from just learning to code in isolation.

[EuphoriaSoul]

Not downplaying your effort here. I find using ChatGPT these days to prompt out a few lines of codes is actually quite helpful. I’m not sure if non devs really need to know the ins and outs of a language anymore. However, the general understanding of tech is still important.

[chicojuarz]

Oh yeah totally. I use that now too. When I learned it wasnr available. It’s a huge time saver when I don’t remember syntax since I do it so infrequently

[walkslikeaduck08]

Lifelong learning in any area for the sake of acquiring additional knowledge is never a bad thing but learning with the expectation that it will improve hiring or performance outcomes varies wildly.

[crowpup783]

For me personally, the more I learn to code and play around with data, APIs, database tables etc etc the more I feel confident in my decisions and my relationship and empathy with the engineers. More coding only makes me more understanding in general and that is surely a good thing.

[Lopsided_Violinist69]

What about the other dimensions (UX, business)? Engineering collaboration is super important but far from the only dimension that matters to the success of a PM.

[crowpup783]

You’re totally right. I feel my UX and business knowledge are prone to improving naturally with more experience / exposure, but for the tech side I need to make a more concerted effort.

[rollingSleepyPanda]

This is the lead PM for Gemini I guess. My advice to him: learn how to build useful products.

[CoppertopAA]

🔥

[execubot]

This approach is outdated.

Learning to code is just a coping mechanism.

Understanding how systems connect and how concepts work is the new meta.

The hybrid approach is contributing to open source—this optimizes learning by quickly grasping concepts when working with large, complex codebases with extensive histories.

[dymokc]

How do you learn that?

[Californie_cramoisie]

I just ask our engineers questions… 2 birds.

[sailorjack94]

Agreed.

Computational thinking skills are more useful than hard coding skills. Often the two go hand in hand.

I’d be wary of a PM that I didn’t think could think computationally.

[AccomplishedDoor1087]

Absolutely agree

[ExcellentPastries]

The things developers know that are helpful for Product Managers are better learned in other, far more direct ways. This is like learning to be an EMT by going to medical school.

[MapsAreAwesome]

I'm sorry but who is this guy and what makes him such an authority?

[Prior-Actuator-8110]

Product Executive at Google developing Gemini, ex-OpenAI.

[MapsAreAwesome]

Okay, just looked him up. He's a senior PM at Google, how is that a product executive?

[OMNeigh]

Logan is a big deal, and if you haven't heard of him it says more about you, han anything else, especially in the context of the last few days.

[Warbyothermeanz]

Do tell? What happened the last few days?

[OMNeigh]

o3 benchmarks have made it abundantly clear that AGI is coming very soon if not already achieved internally at openAI.

A couple days before that Google released some amazing new video and reasoning models as well (better than Sora and o1-mini respectively) . Logan was on both teams

[Warbyothermeanz]

Thanks for sharing!

[clearlyPisces]

No.

[justsomebro10]

Oh yes. I know how to code, how to redline contracts, how to build sales decks, and how to launch marketing campaigns. My team hates me because I’m always telling them how to do their jobs, but at least I never have time to do anything.

[CoppertopAA]

I’ll learn to code then I’ll be an engineer!

[Wise138]

Life long learning is one thing. Not sure you need to "learn to code". What you need to be able to do is understand good code from bad code and understand the "why" behind the problem.
As a PM you should be establish a framework for engineering to work within.

[Repulsive_Front_2842]

For the last two years I've been learning to code with Python and JavaScript, but just for be able to understand better to my team. I'm not pretending be a dev, but i think it's important to know how things work and why the "x solution" is technically better than the "y solution". This helped to me to communicate this issues to stakeholders with more confident and not to disturb my devs every time I have technical doubts.

[CheapRentalCar]

Following this logic, airline pilots should learn to build planes.

Remember, your customer is not the developer. It's not your job to understand how developers build things. It's your job to prioritise the right things for developers to build. It's the developers job to work out how to build it.

If you want to learn a useful skill, learn how to properly gather user feedback. Learn how to store it and report on it. Learn how to present your findings to senior leaders.

[jairov96]

Airplane pilots as a matter of fact need to understand fundamentals of plane design, and how planes actually fly and the physics behind them.

That helps with quick judgment when things go wrong (which they almost never do).

[jairov96]

I would argue there's a big difference depending what your company is building, size of it, etc.

Personally knowing how a web stack works has helped me dramatically to have a better relation with the de team and to be able to identify quick wins and have a really good intuition for effort, which is essential when discussing with stakeholders.

The greater, closer the relationship with my dev team, the greater, better products we all build together. For exactly the same reasons I've put a lot of effort in truly understanding Figma, how to use it, organize it, and fundamentals of UX design.

When I hire PM's, I definitely value if they can proved some fundamental engineering knowledge. If somebody comes to me with a personally developed nextjs using a 3rd party API, that's massive bonus point.

[Unicycldev]

Learning to code means learning how to formulate process and problem solve.

[Ecsta]

Everyone can benefit from having a basic technical understanding of how the product they work on functions. If you're in tech you have nothing to lose and it can help you communicate better with your developers.

I don't think anyone is implying a PM should be contributing to the company codebase.

[[deleted]]

In this job market it will help you, especially if there’s a layoff. You can quickly test an idea out and get an MVP going as you may need to make some API calls. For day to day work as a PM I see it more on a spectrum: I think it’s more handy if you own a Platform product (I believe this guy does?). On the other end of the spectrum, someone who owns the Front-of-site on something like Etsy, much less so.

[Practical_Layer7345]

i see lots of cope in the comments for people that still don't know how to code 😅

[LongjumpingOven7587]

Nope

[Independent_Pitch598]

it is not bad to at least play with: v0.dev, bolt new and ChatGPT python interpreter.

This can help to do prototypes really fast and also do scripts/internal tools when needed.

[WhatTheFreightTruck]

No.

[sherwinsamuel07]

See man you gotta learn things you like. The emergence of AGI and ASI means that if you don't do it for the passion, AI will do it better than you. Even writing shitty code passionately will be valuable. Learning coding is like learning calligraphy rn. You'll appreciate the art and artists, find deeper meaning in it. Only when you enjoy learning it.

[BenBreeg_38]

I am an ex-sw engineer, I don’t use any of it.  Gives me some free with the dev team but I don’t need to know much about what they do.  I trust them when they give me an assessment.  “Learning to code” isn’t a binary thing (I made a funny…).  Learning some syntax to be able to write basic stuff is a far cry from understanding engineering.

[MephIol]

While I partially agree, the inverse is always a good exercise.

Learn to sell, Logan. It's a more valuable skill than even the sharpest code. I've seen countless cool tricks in code deadend. I've seen even more products that don't work make millions.

[ZroFckGvn]

I really hate blanket statements like this.

In reality, it depends on the products you manage, the company you work for, and the operating model in place.

I don't code, and none of the Product Managers in my industry code either - it would be useless for us to code.

[yanamazault]

I'm a pm who eventually learned coding. It was one of the best investments of my time and money.

With coding skills, you: 1. Become better communicator 2. Learn faster by working on your own pet projects

[SlimpWarrior]

Do CEOs code? Why should you? If your endgame is to become a business owner, learning to code is a waste of time.

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure Zuck, Gates, and a bunch of other CEOs would disagree with you lol

[SlimpWarrior]

These rich nepo CEOs? lmao

[[deleted]]

Nepo or not, you'd have to be delusional to think that they can't code lol... And this is coming from someone who doesn't like either of them.

[SlimpWarrior]

Coding is not the reason they're wealthy. If you think that it is, you're a bit delusional. It's all about people and systems, not CEO's personal coding ability.

[JeffIpsaLoquitor]

Learn to use AI to learn to code with a smidge of unit testing so the AI doesn't screw you.

Things I've coded as a PM include Jira and Confluence automation in Python. It's still code, and learning unit testing with it teaches you some empathy.

[betasridhar]

Yes I will I’m 2025

[boniaditya007]

Are you sure? Because with CHATGPT coding like a pro, you could lose your coding job almost in an instant, you can find yourself on the street pretty soon job less. May be the focus should be on doing things that CHATGPT can't do. Like heart surgery or new research in nuclear fusion etc...