One of the questions that comes up a lot for me is "how technical does a product manager need to be?"
By now you may be familiar with the official PM answer "it depends."
So in today's episode, I've asked my longtime friend and collaborator, Andrew Bodis, to dive more deeply into this question from the perspective of a highly technical product manager.
Andrew's love for technology started back in Communist Hungary - when as a young boy he got his hands on his first video game (a primitive handheld version of Duck Hunt).
From there he emigrated to Canada, got accepted into the University of Toronto - one of Canada's most prestigious Science and Engineering schools - only to drop out one year later, at eighteen, to join the world of tech startups in the first wave of the Internet boom.
When the bubble burst in 1998 he made another unpopular decision: to leave his high paying job as a technical project manager to start his own business.
Today Andrew leads a team of twenty programmers as Chief Technology Officer of The Development Factory, a product consultancy we co-founded over a decade ago.
Andrew has helped dozens of clients conceive, design and launch new products including two of his own: My Time Blocks and Rocket Reel. He's a rare case study of a developer turned entrepreneur turned product manager and he sat down with 100 PM podcast in our season 1 finale to tell us all about his journey.
"The technical aspect is knowing how to build the product, but that doesn't mean you know how to build the right product, and there's a big difference there." Andrew Bodis
Tune in below for the full conversation which includes:
- Why every company should have their own API
- Assessing the impact of change
- Exploring the myth of the "full stack developer"
- Tips for keeping good developer relations
Click here to read Andrew's article "API First" as referenced in the show.
In this episode:
- Where do startups go wrong with implementing OKRs
- Can OKRs really scale for enterprise?
- What are pipelines and how do they change the way we think about product roadmaps?
In this episode:
- From retail to product management
- Why relationship building is the number one required skill a product manager could have
- The value of having confidence with humility
In this episode:
- Establishing a clear vision of your career path
- Using metrics to answer burning product questions
- What product managers can learn from biology
