Learning Tech Basics for Non-Technical PMs

As a product manager without a technical background, I’ve faced challenges in getting a deep enough understanding of the tech used at my company to be able to effectively understand the conversations that I’m a part of.

In my past career as a UX director, I worked a great deal with various eCommerce systems (Websphere and Hybris) as well as CMSes (mostly Adobe Experience Manager). But now that I work at a B2B SaaS company, the technologies are considerably different. And since we’re 100% remote, it’s not possible to overhear developer chatter and pick up on context.

While obviously I can (and do!) ask the developers directly to explain key concepts, I’ve found some great resources online that have helped a great deal.

Every time that I hear a new technical term that I’m not familiar with during a meeting, I write it in a doc. When I have a free moment, I look it up and add a definition to the doc, creating a great resource for myself that grows over time.

In this article, I’ve listed out a variety of free and paid resources that might be helpful for others in a similar position.

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Intro to SQL for Product Managers, Part 3

Please check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.

In this section, I’ll talk about a few ways to look at time when it comes to SQL queries.

Time is often an important piece of the puzzle for a product manager.

How many people have done x in the last 30 days? How many people did x within 7 days of signing up? How has our cancellation rate changed over time? How many people did x before we made a change vs after? etc.

Queries to figure out any of that require a good understanding of how to make the appropriate queries in SQL.

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