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3 min read Product Management

How to be a good product manager with business background

Here is my advice for business people in how they should be good product managers.

How to be a good product manager with business background
Melissa and Doug geometric stacker for my daughter (Photo Credits: BL)

Here is an opinion I have held for a while: technical product managers in technology companies with scientific and engineering backgrounds are genuinely more superior against product managers who have come up from the business track. The only drawback is that the technical product managers lack three essential skills: business knowledge in sales and marketing, flexibility to deal with business constraints and management experience. Yet, those skills can be learned far more easily against a business product manager who simply do not have the technical know-hows. Even if this is so, it is not the end of the world for the business product managers. A few MBAs or startup founders with no technology backgrounds have posed this question to me, “If I want to be a good product manager in a technology, how can I become one given that I have no technology background?”

To answer that question, the best way to think about this is the weaknesses of a business product manager. Like their technical counterparts, they also lacked three essential skills: technical knowledge in how a product is built, demonstrate too much flexibility that they under-estimated the timelines towards their ambitious milestones and giving too much leeway to the customers who demand from the smallest bugs to the high blue sky. Here are some advice that I offer to business people who want to become better product managers or startup CEOs (who have to be a product manager).

Ultimately, a product manager should not tilt towards technology or business but have the right balance to achieve product-market fit with the customer.