Joining a technical product as a non technical person
October 20, 2018
Brief background on Manifold:
Manifold is a marketplace for developer tools (think Heroku Elements). They’re on a mission to reduce the complexity of building and deploying applications with microservices and third-party infrastructure services.
If that all sounded like gibberish to you, imagine you want to build a house (equivalent to an app or product), instead of chopping down a tree to make your own lumber, and mining your own metal, etc, you just went to Home Depot to get all those materials. That’s modern software development. You don’t need to build all parts of the product, simply purchase the SaaS products (development tools) that do the job you need and put it all together. (This is an oversimplification but bear with me).
As you might imagine, a company building a product to manage developer tools... for developers… has a very strong and technical engineering team.
Extremely brief background on me:
I have a degree in Human Biology and a Masters in Public Health. I worked in health tech prior to joining Manifold and didn’t know much about software development.
I recently left my product role at Manifold and had some time to reflect on my experience of joining a technical product as a non technical person. As my mentor and manager Peter would later put it, “You’ve been through the product wringer”. I am more confident as a product manager after going through it, and I want to encourage anyone out there who is thinking about joining a technical product or feel like they might not be ‘technical enough’, to take the plunge.
You Might Be Wondering
How did I end up at Manifold? Luck, timing, perhaps my hiring manager took pity on me. Probably a combination of all three. When I asked Peter why he hired an extremely unqualified person, he said ‘You demonstrated the desire and ability to learn.’ I didn’t realize at the time, but I was hungry to learn more about software development. Software is such an integral part of my daily life that it seemed silly that it was a huge black box to me. If you find yourself outside of your technical depth or recently joined a product that requires you to have more engineering knowledge, here are some tips to help with your transition.
Five tips to mentally prepare:
Expect that you’ll have to work twice (10x?) as hard as everyone else
You will have to do more work than others who have the relevant experience, but if you’re curious, this will come naturally to you.
Be humble, but bold
Accept that you don’t know, but don’t be afraid to ask questions and voice your opinions as you are learning.
Build relationships with the team
This is important whether you’re a technical person or not, but especially as a newbie. You’ll rely on the team to give you context and be patient with you as you ramp up. Having a strong foundation with them will make this process a lot smoother.
Learn, learn, and learn, as much and as fast as you can
You will be starting with a blank slate, take advantage of that.
Find a mentor
I’m not going to lie, it will get tough and you will feel some burn out. Having a mentor that has your back will help, often by reminding you that you’re capable and you’ll get through this.
Six actionable tips with resources:
Start with learning how the internet works
I had no idea how I just floated through life without ever learning what went behind typing in a website to the browser bar to loading the page. This five minute video does a good job at explaining it.
Learn how computers work from first invented till today
Same here, I use my computer everyday but had no idea how it actually worked. CrashCourse on Youtube has some great videos on this subject.
JavaScript bootcamp
Learning to code (more like learning how code works since I still wouldn’t say I can code) was perhaps when I made the biggest leap forward to becoming technical. This was the GA JS bootcamp I did with my education stipend. The online course was great but difficult to juggle with a full time job. Again if you are starting behind, you will have to work harder to catch up.
Jump into user research, you learn so much chatting with actual engineers
I was really afraid to do user research with real engineers outside the org. What if they laugh at me? What if they find out I’m a fraud? Once I started, I realize they don’t expect me to know everything and when encountering something I don’t understand, I can just ask.
Your team is a great resource
Don’t be afraid to ask questions, most of the time it only takes 1 minute to get context about a topic in order to get on the same page. Your team will also steer you toward legit places to learn more about what you need to know.
Use Stackoverflow, Stackshare, and ELI5 on Reddit for topics you want a brief overview on
They are all free online resources, even the most senior engineers still look up how to do things on Stackoverflow.
The truth is, you won’t ever feel comfortable or like you’ve learned enough (that’s a good thing and also completely normal!) but I promise you’ll be a different person after doing all this for a year.
After a year and a half at Manifold, I walked away with a ton of knowledge about the developer experience, dev ops, the latest and greatest tools, and best practices for software development in the modern day. The skills I developed there will undoubtedly help me be a better product manager and to be effective working with any engineering team.
Still, the most transformative part of my whole experience is finally believing that I am ‘technical enough’.
I may not be an engineer or have a CS degree, but I can and will learn as just all engineers have had to learn their craft. I proved that I was technical everyday, working alongside the strongest engineering team at Manifold.
Let me know if you have an ‘unconventional’ background working in a technical field, I would love to learn about your experience.
Illustrations by David Zheng