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Product management is more than defining features and setting deadlines. It’s about ensuring your product is innovative, scalable, and built to last. To lead effectively, you don’t need to be an engineer, but understanding the language of engineering can help you make more informed decisions, communicate effectively, and set realistic expectations. By learning the general principles of the technology behind your product, you can drive smarter, more strategic development.
Asking the Right Questions
Great product managers don’t have all the answers, but they instead ask the right questions. When you understand the fundamentals of the programming language your engineers use, you can spot potential constraints and opportunities early. For example, Elixir’s strengths in concurrency and scalability allow it to handle thousands of users simultaneously with minimal overhead. Knowing these strengths of the language, you can make recommendations around scaling and deployment of your product that you otherwise would need to research in advance. If you have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, you can propose features that are both innovative and technically feasible, without over-promising or under-delivering.
Bridging the Gap Between Business and Engineering
One of the biggest challenges in product management is translating technical realities to business stakeholders. Misalignment between teams can lead to unrealistic expectations, miscommunication, and missed deadlines. A foundational understanding of your engineers’ tools allows you to provide more accurate timelines, communicate technical challenges more clearly, and advocate for the best solutions without overpromising. This also helps in conversations with clients or investors—you’re able to explain why certain features might be more complex than they appear, or why scaling a product in a certain way requires additional planning.
Prioritizing Security and Stability
Security is often seen as an engineering concern, but it’s a product concern, too. Certain programming languages, like Elixir, offer built-in security advantages, such as process isolation, that reduce the risk of widespread breaches. As a product manager, recognizing these security benefits allows you to prioritize safer design choices and align your roadmap with long-term security needs.
Scalability is another critical area where technical awareness pays off. Many product managers underestimate the effort required to scale a system. Understanding how your product handles load balancing, concurrency, and distributed processes helps you set realistic growth expectations and avoid costly architectural overhauls down the road. You’re less likely to promise features or performance that won’t scale, and more likely to build with long-term sustainability in mind. This not only improves your product’s reliability but also ensures that you’re not scrambling to patch performance issues as your user base expands.
Cultivating Empathy and Stronger Collaboration
Technical fluency doesn’t just improve decision-making, it makes you a better leader. Engineers constantly balance speed with reliability, security with performance, and innovation with feasibility. By learning more about the tools they use, you gain insight into the trade-offs they navigate daily. This makes you a more effective collaborator, helping to foster trust and alignment within your team.
A deeper technical understanding also enables you to respond more confidently when stakeholders request new features or express concerns about performance. Instead of simply relaying technical questions to your engineers, you can provide initial context and guide conversations in a more productive direction. This builds trust with both your internal team and external stakeholders, positioning you as a knowledgeable leader who understands both the business and the technology behind the product.
Product Managers Don’t Need to Code, But They Do Need to Understand
Becoming fluent in engineering concepts doesn’t mean you need to write code. It means understanding how your product is built so you can make better strategic decisions. Whether it’s knowing how Elixir handles concurrency, understanding why certain features are complex to implement, or recognizing security trade-offs, your ability to communicate in the language of engineering strengthens your role as a product leader.
By deepening your technical understanding, you create a more seamless collaboration between product and engineering, leading to better outcomes for your team, your users, and your business.
