I've been doing a lot of vibe coding lately, and it made me realise how modern AI tools can help PMs quickly upskill and become more versed in the technical side of product development.
Why be a technical PM?
Could you be a PM without any technical understanding? Yes, you can. There are many flavours of product management, and some of them don't require even a light technical understanding. However, there are benefits to having some technical knowledge for PMs.More job opportunities
A simple job search for the title technical product manager returns thousands of results. In most of those opportunities, having some technical understanding is a core requirement of the role.Better conversations with your dev team
Technical PMs find it easier and faster to work with development teams. Using the same lingo and understanding the basics of software engineering could make your collaboration with the dev team more efficient and pleasant.Better opportunity assessment
As PMs, we get (and generate) tons of ideas on a daily basis. Some of those ideas might sound great until you talk to your dev team and they tell you, "It's not feasible". Being even a little bit technical might shortcut this - you could do a basic assessment yourself and evaluate if an opportunity could be real.Better troubleshooting
A "lion's share" of PM work is "fire-fighting". Technology often breaks, and bugs sneak in. Being technical allows you to assess faster the latest crisis and know who to ask for help or where to start digging.A chance of innovation
A huge number of innovations in the last few decades have been created by people at the intersections of competencies. A classic startup story is a technical founder +... It takes some technical understanding to identify promising tech and use it in a novel way to create value.Which neatly leads me into AI vibe coding.
How AI vibe coding might help you become a technical PM
I never considered myself particularly technical. Yes, I did finish a computer science degree, but that was ages ago, and even then, my code was quite bad. What I always found fascinating is trying to understand how modern software is being built. I listened to engineers at work discussing pros and cons of different programming languages, I watched tutorial videos for cloud-based hosting, I experimented with designing my own artificial neural net. How much did I understand? Not much in the beginning, but I kept trying and still trying to become more technical.Now the vibe coding tools made one of my dreams come true - I can now create functional software even if I can't write code myself. Here's the process I use:
- Prompt AI builder in a similar way to how I would describe a task to a human developer
- Read and try to understand the generated code
- Run it, test it, encounter issues
- Try to fix it, go crazy, panic, try again
So far, I've been pretty happy with the results. I treat it like a game with variable rewards - sometimes I "don't win" for a while, so it's frustrating, but when it works - the endorphins are flying!
These vibe coding side projects have been majorly beneficial to my job as a PM. I felt like I've improved my technical understanding in certain areas, and I definitely now empathise much more with engineers who have to solve very tricky problems on a daily basis.
Most importantly, it's not only me. Many PMs jumped on vibe coding lately for different reasons. Some of us want to build something we have always dreamed of building. Some are just prototyping. Others are satisfying their curiosity. But we are all learning to become more technical. And so can you.
Who knows what will happen to the PM job in the future, but if it continues to exist - being more technical will be beneficial. Technical PMs will have more job opportunities, they will better understand colleagues in development, and they will have increased chances of creating the winning products.