Why Product Managers (& Marketers) Should Learn to Code

Building products is amazing. You take an idea — sometimes big, sometimes small — and with your team you make it real. Or at least you make a version of it come to life and then send it out into the world to see what real people do with it.

Every day I find this creatively inspiring. To craft a product from scratch brings a range of feelings; from joy and pleasure to frustration and despair. Whether a quickly drawn sketch, an MVP, physical product, iterative improvements or a brand new feature, all studiously validated with user research and customer development, you roll up your sleeves to make it happen. It is a magical, continuous, learning experience.

I’m now on the fault line between users and technology. I’ve had all sorts of job titles; digital marketer, growth hacker, creative technologist, UXer, startup product person, product strategist, product owner, lean coach and consultant. I’ve been a startup founder — when I completely tanked my first foray building product.

All of these roles have involved building products and telling people about new products and features they might be interested in. Over time I’ve become more technically literate as my projects began to require more technical work.

A Sense of Frustration

However I’ve struggled with the nagging thought that I should learn to code. As a non-coder deep in product and marketing, I’ve found it increasingly frustrating that I must stand by while I could see that my teams could do with more help. It felt uncomfortable and disempowering. From both a personal and professional perspective I wanted to be more productive, understand the development process better, improve sprint effectiveness and get further under the skin of all that goes along with building and growing products.

At present I’m freelancing, working in product, UX and marketing roles. I tend to work with startups, though I have also been involved with more established companies — roles where research, UX and marketing considerations really have an impact on what is built. Almost everything I work on involves technical people or working with digital products, and both product roles and marketing ones are becoming ever more technical. A functional knowledge of how tech works and how to build it is not only helpful but is becoming critical.

I’m seeing it more and more — in job specs, interviews, among my peer group — where technical understanding is becoming an expected skill. Not all members of a product team need to be a hardcore coder, but when everyone has a firm foundation of how all the pieces fit together and function, I firmly believe that it helps.

Learning the Language

We’ve all seen how putting users’ voices closer to the design and development improves product and experience outcomes. In the same way I’m starting to see how raising a team’s technical baseline has a positive impact on product development roadmaps and implementations. A rising tide raises all ships.

I have tried to learn to code a few times, but just teaching myself or taking a few short courses, I couldn’t make it stick. I would try to learn the language that was being used in my projects, which in hindsight was too scatter-gun an approach, applied inconsistently. Still, I had an ever-growing curiosity to overcome this invisible barrier, even though it continued to feel frustratingly elusive.

I sort-of understood coding, but I wouldn’t have been be able to sit down and create a digital product or feature. Like knowing the universe is really, really big but not grasping the absolute scale. It was turning into a worry that I just wouldn’t overcome it, or have the time to invest properly in it. A puzzle that I couldn’t quite slot all the pieces into place. Not something I am comfortable having hanging over me.

Eventually I decided to go on a SuperHi course. It’s a startup that teaches designers, product people and marketers to code both online and in small classes in London and New York. I enrolled on a course last year and I can now jump into a code editor and bring an idea to life. I’m now starting to contribute more in my projects beyond product development, UX and marketing. In fact the experience of learning to code with SuperHi has been so positive for me that I now help them out occasionally with ad campaigns and product feedback.

While no one will pay me to code (yet), it’s the start of a journey that’s already reaping personal satisfaction, and all the while I’m having fun bringing silly side projects to life. Self-side note: must stop buying domain names!

In case you wonder, my first instinct is still to draw on the wall, rather than in code, though maybe that will change in time, with practice.

Once you can Code, Practice is key

It now feels like the training wheels have been taken off. I now don’t feel afraid of coding, and I’m confident that I can hack something together. I try to code at least once a week as practice is key — to try out new things and keep learning, increasing in confidence by breaking things and figuring out how to fix them.

It’s interesting to think about where the line is between design, product and marketing these days. We all know that marketing can’t sell shoddy products and create delighted users. It’s like taking water uphill in a bucket full of holes. Maybe we’ll all come to see it as strange that some marketers could build products without deep knowledge of the customer and how they use a product. In a similar way, perhaps we’ll also ultimately find it bizarre that we could all be part of teams building digital products without an understanding of how to code.

For me, learning to code was important, even if I wasn’t always completely sure how I was going to apply it. It doesn’t necessarily matter how deep you go. It now feels foundational from both a work and a life perspective.To me the ability to code is like being fluent in another language — incredibly useful for communicating with a wider group of people than you’d otherwise be able to engage with and one of those hard skills that widens your horizons.

A Skill set for the Future

We’re all gradually becoming less silo-ed and more cross-skilled in teams and companies. And if you factor in the way that automation is increasing in our daily lives you can see that these trends will only accelerate in the next 10 years. I think that in the future our most important “soft” skill will be developing our ability to learn and adapt: as one thing becomes obsolete it’s a natural reflex for you to move on — building more skills as you go — with the minimum of personal disruption possible. It doesn’t matter whether you work in startups or for large organisations, keeping up to date means you spread out from your core expertise. Industries change all the time so it’s important to keep pushing yourself forward. As they say: if it feels uncomfortable, you’re probably exactly where you need to be. Keep going.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this and if you’re on your own journey of learning, discovery and transformation. Has coding been something you’ve wanted to do or have struggled to get to grips with and do you have any tips?

If you’d like to check out more on SuperHi 👇👇 👇 https://www.SuperHi.com/

Originally published at www.mindtheproduct.com on May 5, 2017.