Returning to code, worth it for a Product Manager?

The past couple of weeks have given me opportunities to reflect on what I like about my job and previous experience. Partly because we are expanding the team at 15below, partly from doing a bit of coding. I have written a bit about becoming "post-technical" in the past, but now is the first time I have done much code in years.

 The thing that I enjoy most is solving problems and helping people. Throughout my career solving business problems to help create positive outcomes has always been fulfilling. Now I get to help do that, then go back and refine the solutions. You don't always get to do that as a developer or in a project focused role.

Side project

Code wot I wrote
The first bit of coding is on my side project. Martyn has created a great architecture and I contributed the project import from LinkedIn (almost) all by myself. It feels to brilliant to code on a side project - you get a sense of achievement from seeing an idea come to life. It also provides a way to express ideas and a method of  collaboration. It's easier sometime to do some rough code and then hand over to a proper developer to complete. It also helps that Elixir is a nice language to use, and reminds me of Prolog.

Work

The second bit of coding recently has been creating a report for work. Slightly different motivation here. I needed some information to share and the developer resource to surface it was better used elsewhere. I had just enough skill to self-serve the report creation and I was still exploring what was interesting and tweaking how the data was tagged. So, it was much simpler for me to prototype what I needed. Once this has stabilised then I expect to handover to get integrated fully into our MIS reporting.

 It has been fun using the RStudio environment, again with a nod to previous experience this time Matlab, although the language is different. I have an environment in an AWS instance that I can access via the browser on my Chromebook, and an install on my Windows laptop.

Should Product Mangers code?

At the same time all this was going on, a blog post answering the question "Should product managers know how to code?" popped up. I must admit, my heart did sink a little to see what that might contain. However, I was pleasantly surprised. In particular the tip it gives about learning some CSS and exploring  ‘Inspect Element’  to tweak pages and see how changes will look. Also learning what happens where in your application is a good idea. The best people I know that work in non-technical roles in software understand this.

 So, although it's fun I don't think Product Managers need to code. It can be useful in understanding. Or self-serving for quickly prototyping ideas.

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