Topics:
Boost your technicality (as a PM) or tech product skills (as an engineer) to grow in your current role
What you'll learn:
Why does a Tech Product Manager role…
Technical Product Manager
- FAQ
- Courses
- Certifications
- Careers
- Jobs
- Companies
- Skills
- Articles
Written byMatthew Urwin
UPDATED BY
Matthew Urwin | Feb. 08, 2023
What Is a Technical Product Manager? How to Become One, Salary, Skills.
Technical product managers execute a product vision by focusing on the engineering and design aspects of a product. Here’s what to know about a technical product manager’s salary, needed skills and how to become one.
What Is a Technical Product Manager?
Technical product managers focus on the design and technical needs of a product, working closely with engineering personnel.
What Do Technical Product Managers Do?
Technical product managers bring a product vision to life by working with teams to create and perfect the design elements of a product.
Technical Product Manager Responsibilities
- Research market trends, competitor products and user feedback data.
- Contribute to product vision and design product roadmap.
- Align engineering and product teams behind common goals.
- Work on product design with engineering, quality assurance, software development and other technical teams.
- Develop testing procedures and establish standards for product success.
Day-to-Day Responsibilities of a Technical Product Manager
- Make decisions on which features to add or revise for new product version.
- Analyze data from market research, competitive analyses and user feedback.
- Conduct beta tests and determine potential product issues and necessary fixes.
- Meet with product managers, product owners and other product leaders to discuss product development progress.
- Meet with engineering, quality assurance and software development teams to share product insights and communicate product roadmap.
Technical Product Managers Within a Company
Technical product managers often work within larger organizations and complement the roles of more general product managers. Wielding their specialized knowledge, technical product managers collaborate with the engineering team, serving as a bridge between engineering and product personnel. However, technical product managers may also work with QA, software development, marketing, sales and customer support to ensure the successful development and performance of a product.
Importance of Technical Product Managers
Technical product managers design and oversee product roadmaps, working with various teams to craft the design aspects of a product that meets the needs of users. Without these specialized professionals, product and engineering teams would struggle to collaborate and create products that meet both functionality and customer standards.
What Skills Are Needed to Be a Technical Product Manager?
Qualifications to Be a Technical Product Manager
- Background in software development, engineering or another technical field.
- Understanding of the product development process.
- Knowledge of product and software development methods.
- Experience in a leadership or managerial role.
Technical Product Manager Prerequisites
- Bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, information technology or a related field.
- At least two years of experience in a technical position.
- At least one year of experience in a senior or leadership role is highly preferable.
- Ability to balance product development and design-specific responsibilities.
Technical Product Manager Hard Skills
- Research skills for analyzing market trends, competitor products and user-product interactions.
- Knowledge of how to design and execute product roadmaps.
- Expertise in a company’s product features and components.
- Familiarity with common software development tools and techniques.
- Experience with beta testing and collecting user feedback.
Technical Product Manager Soft Skills
- Openness to feedback for informing product decisions with customer recommendations.
- Thoughtful approach for designing products that are ethical and accessible.
- Strong communication skills for sharing product goals and design objectives with product and engineering personnel.
- Multi-disciplinary approach for engaging with needs in marketing, sales, quality assurance and other areas.
- Excellent time management skills for holding teams accountable for meeting product deadlines.
Tools and Programs Technical Product Managers Use
- Product roadmap software like Aha!, ProductPlan and Canny.
- Beta testing software like UserTesting, TestFlight and Rainforest.
- Survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics and Zoho Survey.
- Programming tools like Collaborator, Studio 3T and Linx.
- Software patch management tools like Atera, Automax and NinjaOne.
How to Become a Technical Product Manager
Technical Product Manager Education and Experience
Technical product managers typically have a bachelor’s degree in software engineering, computer science or a related technical field. Candidates may have some experience with product development and backgrounds in technical positions. Professionals can start out as junior software engineers before transitioning to a senior software engineer role. At this point, an employee could go on to become an engineering manager or even transfer over to a technical product manager role. Rarely do candidates become technical product managers without having proven experience in a technical-focused role.
Technical Product Manager Certificates and Courses
- Product management courses to increase familiarity with product development.
- Coding bootcamps to sharpen software development skills.
- Leadership training programs to strengthen managerial skills.
- Data science courses to reinforce research and analysis skills.
- Technical product manager certifications from groups like Product HQ.
Technical Product Manager Career Path
Technical product managers who find success in their roles may move up to become senior product managers after around three years. They can then go on to pursue higher roles like director of product management, vice president of product and chief product officer.
Technical Product Manager Salary and Job Outlook
Similar to technical product managers, advertising, promotions and marketing managers can expect to witness a 10 percent increase in the number of relevant jobs between 2021 and 2031.
The full compensation package for a technical product manager depends on a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s experience and geographic location. See below for detailed information on the average technical product manager salary.
Courses
Expand Your Technical Product Manager Career Opportunities
Raise your daily performance by learning product management skills through Udemy’s online courses.
Udemy
(644)
Certifications
Technical Product Manager Certifications + Programs
Explore more exciting opportunities for your career with Udacity’s online product management certifications.
General Assembly’s Product Management course teaches the end-to-end product management (PM) process to a real-world scenario, from evaluating users and managing a roadmap to creating a minimum viable product (MVP) and developing metrics.
What you'll accomplish
This is a beginner-friendly program with no prerequisites, although students may have had exposure to product development concepts or be informally taking on PM responsibilities in their current role. Throughout this expert-designed program, you’ll:
- Determine key risks and assumptions of a product in order to prioritize research and discovery work.
- Validate hypotheses by gathering user feedback via MVPs, interviews, experiments, and testing.
- Execute competitive research to highlight market gaps and trends.
- Speak fluently with developers, user experience designers, and other business stakeholders about priorities, requirements, and workflow.
- Apply metrics alongside objectives and key results (OKRs) to measure a product’s success and track its life cycle.
- Apply what you’ve learned to create a portfolio project: a presentation detailing your product creation strategy.
Why General Assembly
Since 2011, General Assembly has graduated more than 40,000 students worldwide from the full time & part time courses. During the 2020 hiring shutdown, GA's students, instructors, and career coaches never lost focus, and the KPMG-validated numbers in their Outcomes report reflect it. *For students who graduated in 2020 — the peak of the pandemic — 74.4% of those who participated in GA's full-time Career Services program landed jobs within six months of graduation. General Assembly is proud of their grads + teams' relentless dedication and to see those numbers rising. Download the report here.
Your next step? Submit an application to talk to the General Assembly Admissions team
Note: reviews are referenced from Career Karma - https://careerkarma.com/schools/general-assembly
Udacity
Beginner
2 months
5-10 hours
General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive is a transformative course designed for you to get the necessary skills for a coding role in three months.
The Software Engineering bootcamp is led by instructors who are expert practitioners in their field, supported by career coaches that work with you since day one and enhanced by a career services team that is constantly in talks with employers about their tech hiring needs.
What you'll accomplish
As a graduate, you’ll have a portfolio of projects that show your knowledge of fundamental programming concepts, as well as experience with languages, frameworks, and libraries that employers demand. Throughout this expert-designed program, you’ll:
Create a front-end web application with modern JavaScript frameworks such as Angular or React.
Develop and deploy full-stack applications with in-demand technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Python with Django, and Express with Node.js.
Build secure full-stack applications by leveraging common design and architectural patterns like model–view–controller (MVC) and Representational State Transfer (REST).
Practice version control and collaborative software development with Git and GitHub.
Safely model and store data in SQL and NoSQL databases.
Consume and integrate third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) in an application.
Why General Assembly
Since 2011, General Assembly has graduated more than 40,000 students worldwide from the full time & part time courses. During the 2020 hiring shutdown, GA's students, instructors, and career coaches never lost focus, and the KPMG-validated numbers in their Outcomes report reflect it. *For students who graduated in 2020 — the peak of the pandemic — 74.4% of those who participated in GA's full-time Career Services program landed jobs within six months of graduation. General Assembly is proud of their grads + teams' relentless dedication and to see those numbers rising. Download the report here.
Your next step? Submit an application to talk to the General Assembly Admissions team
Note: reviews are referenced from Career Karma - https://careerkarma.com/schools/general-assembly
Udacity
Beginner
2 months
5-10 hours
You’ll learn how to evaluate the business value of an AI product. You’ll start by building familiarity and fluency with common AI concepts. You’ll then learn how to scope and build a data set, train a model, and evaluate its business impact. Finally, you’ll learn how to ensure a product is successful by focusing on scalability, potential biases, and compliance. Along the way, you’ll review case studies and examples to help you focus on how to define metrics to measure the business value for a proposed product.
Udacity
Beginner
2 months
5-10 hours
Careers
Careers Related to Technical Product Manager
Jobs
Latest Product Management Jobs
Companies
Companies Hiring Technical Product Managers
Skills
Most Common Skills for Technical Product Manager
Articles
