By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Guest post by Justin Gage, writer of Technically, offering five practical technical areas product managers should understand to work more effectively with engineers. He argues that a strong technical foundation makes PMs more effective, though the depth needed depends on the company. The areas are the tech stack, sensitive parts of the codebase, the build and deploy process, how to make small code contributions, and basic technical concepts. Each section pairs what to know and why it matters with concrete ways to learn it, such as reading repositories, asking engineers, reading engineering blogs, and talking to outside developers.
01Key takeaways
- Investigate your repositories and ask engineers to learn which languages and frameworks your product uses.
- Ask teammates which code areas are fragile or slow, and plan projects around those constraints.
- Learn how long deploys take and whether they are manual, so you can batch features and time releases well.
- Make small copy or design fixes yourself through a PR, keeping changes narrow and low-risk.
- Read engineering blogs and search every unfamiliar term to build technical literacy over time.
- Prepare pointed questions before talking with outside developers to get useful answers quickly.
02Key sections
- Learn your company's tech stack
- PMs should know which languages, frameworks and infrastructure their product uses, since these choices shape how long work takes. Repositories and team conversations reveal this quickly.
- Identify sensitive points in the codebase
- Some parts of the code are tangled or hard to test, which causes delays. Knowing these areas helps PMs plan realistically and allocate resources.
- Understand the build and deploy process
- Deployment steps and timing affect how features get batched and released, especially for on-premise customers. Pull requests and CI tooling expose these details.
- Contribute small code changes
- PMs can fix copy and minor design issues themselves if they keep changes small and low-risk. Learning the workflow with an engineer is the recommended starting point.
- Build technical basics
- A conceptual grasp of how apps, data and infrastructure fit together is essential. Engineering blogs, looking up unfamiliar terms, and questioning developer friends outside the company help build it.
03From the post
“1. What is a good payback period 2. What is product management 3. The most common pitfalls of new product managers 4. The most important consumer metrics to track Q: How do I become a more technical PM? As you may know, I took a crack at this question a few months ago, and that post that turned out to be one of my all-time most popular posts. But considering how often I still get this question—clearly, questions remain. Also, with the rise of Web3, fintech, data infrastructure companies, and other deeply technical products, it’s only becoming more important for PMs to build their technical chops. To help you develop those chops, I’ve pulled in Justin Gage, author of the fantastic Technically newsletter (fittingly described as “a place for not software engineers to learn about software engineering”), to share his highly actionable tips on becoming a more technical PM. In my previous post on the subject, I linked to Justin’s newsletter numerous times, and that’s because he’s especially talented at explaining deeply technical subjects clearly and directly. We’re super-lucky to…”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.