 A lot of people ask me this question. Is it important to have a computer programming skills in order to become a product manager? Do you really need a technical background to become a product manager? Some people say no, you don't need a computer science degree at all to become a product manager. Some people say absolutely yes, so that you will become much more competitive in the job market. As a hiring manager, I can confidently tell you that both answers were wrong. These wrong advice without customized advice is going to cost you a job offer. The right answer is, it depends. Whether you really need a technical or computer science background to become a product manager really depends on four things. The company culture, the customers, the product, and team structure. In this video, as a product manager, we share with you the correct answer. And I assure you by the end of this video, you will feel much more efficient and confident in your product management job hunting journey. Hey guys, this is Dr. Lin Sili, a direct product from DrLinSili.com. I hope people tradition from worker B to product manager and business leader. If you want to run the most effective way to become a product manager, you should subscribe to the channel and hit the bell button so that you'll be notified every time I post a new video every Wednesday. I've helped hundreds of people to become a product manager in the product manager accelerator program. Lots of them do not have a technical background at all. Let me give you some examples. Some of my students who has an accounting background and got a job offer as a TPM in Facebook. Some of the students has a sales background and he got a job offer from Chase as a product manager. They also have students who has engineering background and got a job offer from Google. So whether you need a technical background really depends on the following four things. Number one, company culture. 90% of the companies out there do not require you to have a computer science degree in order to become a product manager except Google. Google will have a software engineer to interview you to see your understanding of computer science during the interview process because Google is an engineering driven company and their engineers get paid even higher than product managers and engineers are the ones who drive the boat of Google. So therefore with that kind of culture Google really want their product managers to have some technical background. However, product managers that Google does not need to code, they just need to be respected by their software engineers at Google. I have a specific video talked about how to develop a product manager interview at Google. You can check it out right here. I also won't make it in the description of this video. However, it doesn't mean that if you want to join fan companies you have to have technical background. For example, for Facebook, you do not need any engineering background to become a product manager at Facebook as long as you can crack the product management case interviews. I made a specific video about the long product sense interview at Facebook. You can check it out right here. I will also make it in the description as well. Number two, customers. If you are the product manager of consumer facing product or lots of product really require a lot of customer empathy, you do not need technical background at all. Let me give you a specific example. If you are a product manager of a baby product that helps baby to improve their sleep cycles, who would you hire? Somebody who knows how to code? Or a product manager who has customer empathy of moms and understand the baby's sleeping cycle much better than everyone else? If you are a hiring manager, you will definitely hire the second one. However, if you're a product manager of a cloud product, for example, Google Cloud or AWS, Amazon Web Services, it's best to have some engineering background because your end customers are software engineers who is going to use your product on a day-to-day basis. You're going to have a big customer empathy of software engineers. You'd better know how to code as well. I list eight product management skills into master to become a product manager. You can check out this video right here. Now comment in the description of this video. What's your background and what specific product management skills are you trying to master? Number three, product. If your product is super deep tap, yes, you need technical background. For example, if you're building an AI product or you're building a quantum computing product, you better master the computer science skills or the machine learning skills in order to improve and design your product with your engineering team. If you are building a customer-facing product, like lots of B2C products, it's important for you to understand the UI-UX customer emphases and doing customer interviews. And in that case, you don't need an engineering background. It's more important for you to master the front end of product management. On the opposite side, I really think it's more important for you to master the industry-specific knowledge compared with any technical background or computer science background. For example, I have a student who became a product manager of a healthcare company. They really value her healthcare experience managing big and large healthcare projects. I also have students who join TikTok as a product manager and the TikTok hybrid manager really appreciates his background managing ads, design the consumer ads, and put it in front of the end users. So his ads experience got him that job. However, why lots of job openings always say we prefer somebody with engineering background or computer science background? Let me tell you the secret behind the scenes. The reason I ask you those things as good to have was because they want you to be respected by your engineering team. They also want you to be able to communicate very well with your engineering team. On top of that, they also want you to have realistic expectations of project timeline. What if your engineers told you that this project will take a year to finish? Would you be able to push back? And before, they also want you to ask smart questions. So therefore, you do not really need to know how to code. You just need to know how systems work in the software environment. So I highly recommend the Systems Engineering Design Course from MIT. And I also teach you the Systems Design Methodology from MIT in my PM accelerator as well. And over there, we help you to understand how to break down the comprehensive engineering topics into smaller solutions and smaller modules and know how to ask the right questions and also know which part is going to be missing and how would you communicate with your engineering team. That's the core of mastering the technical background as a product manager to become A plus PM. If you want to learn more about my product manager accelerator, you can go check out this webinar where I talk about my experience getting a full product manager job during the pandemic. I'll tell you more about PM accelerator at the end of webinar as well. I'm going to put the link in the description of this video. Number four is the team structure. For example, even if your product is super tacky such as AI product or cloud product and your current team composition has 10 product managers and all nine product managers has a super deep technical background and they all know how to code. Do you think they would hire another coders to become product managers in this team or for the 10th product manager they won't hire someone with business mindset, business background so that they can broader the view of the entire team. And this business product manager can also focus on the GTM and how to bring the product into the hands of the customers. So I wouldn't recommend you guys just give up because some companies and some jobs are sounds very technical. No, you would use the right networking strategy to lend us job opportunities and confidently present yourself in front of the hybrid managers and package your experience using the right resume template. If you want to know how to package your product management experience even if you don't have a technical background you should download this free product management here resume template where it has been used by thousands of product managers to lend their product manager job. You can check out the link right here and see the description in this video. And don't forget to smash the like button so the more people will discover this organic content. Make sure to check out the playlist of product management interview questions and answers right here as well. This is Dr. Nian City. I'm going to see you next time. Bye.