About a year ago, I received an offer from the New York Times: a Technical Product Manager role on the Authentication team.
I had not previously held the title of ‘technical product manager,’ but I was delighted and I took the offer without hesitation. As my first day of work grew nearer and nearer, I felt increasingly nervous. I wondered: what should I do differently as a “technical” product manager?
What is a Technical Product Manager?
Simply put, a ‘technical product manager’ is a product manager with technical customers. With different customer types, different problem spaces are in your purview.
Oftentimes, technical product managers work on “platform” products. These are internal solutions that provide foundational capabilities to teams across the company. By building “platforms,” a single team’s efforts are multiplied, product development is accelerated, and the company’s investments are leveraged with the highest efficiency.
Advice to an Early Career TPM
As a more practiced TPM, here is my guidance to early-career TPMs:
Make sure to orient your product practices to your technical customers. I like to leverage product launch retrospectives to conduct lightweight user research with engineers. I pay particular attention to sources of delight or pain points with our platform product. I also keep a close eye on the questions asked via slack when engineers reach out for help.
Keep the pulse of the developer experience. How easy or difficult is it for engineers to build using your tools? Did an engineer have to ask for help, or were they able to self-serve and implement your solution entirely on their own?
Establish a product strategy that supports your customers’ strategy. To remain one step ahead, maintain strong relationships with your customers in order to stay informed of their recent learnings, strategic pivots, or new bets they are exploring.
Ensure that your product roadmap balances short-term business needs with long-term business needs. For example, you may plan to build a new feature while also planning to re-architect an application so that long-term growth can be sustained.
When introducing something new, leverage prototypes and pilot the change with a friendly customer that is interested in helping you drive improvements.
When retiring a legacy feature, lean in on clear communication, providing guidance on alternate solutions, and using feature flags in case a dependency has been missed.
Provide an easy way for your customers to get help, perhaps by leveraging your developer on-call rotation, and continuously improve your documentation.
Resources
If you are looking to dip your toes into the field of “technical product management,” here are some resources that I recommend to sharpen your technical acumen:
Article | Practices to help you become a technical product manager
Books | Google's SRE book and Production-Ready Microservices
Community | DEV is a friendly community with a wonderful newsletter
Reach out!
I’m also happy to share about my experiences, exchange notes, or provide mentorship. Feel free to reach out directly to me here.
Good luck!