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Why This Ex-Facebook Engineer Thinks Non-Technical Product Managers Are Awesome (Oh and He’s Hiring)
What Leadership Roles at Facebook & YouTube Taught Rushabh Doshi About Building Product Teams
What do I hope happens when I write a blog post? Lots of people to read it? Sure, I guess. But the dream is really smart responses from folks who can help refine or expand my thinking. So after recently revisiting the question about being a product manager without an engineering background, it was delightful to read feedback from two friends.
First the original post
Then my friend Ben Stern’s (PM at Figma, ex-Dropbox) response
https://medium.com/@Benstern0/as-a-former-sales-guy-turned-pm-i-get-this-question-too-4862e234d734
And now, from my friend and former colleague Rushabh Doshi, who was an engineering leader at YouTube, before taking product and engineering roles at Facebook and now Digit. Copy/paste from the email he sent me this morning:
“I love this post.
I think non-technical product managers are awesome and bring a different set of skills and super-powers to the table. I love your advice for non-technical PMs as well. Slight tweaks that I would offer:
1. Be curious. Understand how things really work. Dig, dig, dig until you completely understand the stack. There has never been a better time to be curious — I usually watch experts on YouTube talk about deep topics and gain understanding quickly. Coding is more accessible than ever. Write some code and build some prototypes.
2. Have a super power. The opposite pole of a technologist (who is naturally close to technology) is someone who is very close to understanding the human elements. Non-technical PMs with a background in marketing, user research, design, customer support etc. have a great deal of empathy for the customer and an uncanny ability to put themselves in their customers…
