The Technical PM Handbook

No. Technical PMs need technical literacy, not engineering skills. You should be able to read architecture diagrams, understand API contracts, ask informed questions in design reviews, and reason about system trade-offs. You do not need to write production code, debug stack traces, or configure infrastructure. The goal is fluency, not proficiency — like being conversational in a language without being a native speaker.

A Technical PM owns the product — they define what gets built, why, and for whom. A Technical Program Manager (TPM) owns the execution — they coordinate timelines, dependencies, and delivery across teams. The technical PM decides "we need to build a rate limiting system"; the TPM ensures the 4 teams involved deliver their parts on schedule. Both roles require technical skills, but the PM is accountable for product outcomes while the TPM is accountable for delivery outcomes.

A useful benchmark: you should understand about 70% of what is discussed in engineering design reviews. The remaining 30% is implementation detail you can trust your team to handle. You should be able to explain the proposed technical approach and its trade-offs to a non-technical stakeholder after any architecture discussion. You should not be writing code, proposing specific technical implementations, or overriding engineering judgment on how to build something.

Start by building technical skills on your current team: attend design reviews, learn SQL, read your API docs, and shadow an on-call rotation. Then look for opportunities to own technically complex features within your existing product. Build a portfolio of decisions where your technical understanding led to better product outcomes. When interviewing for technical PM roles, lead with these stories. The transition typically takes 6-18 months of deliberate skill building.

Start with the tools your team already uses: your version control system (Git basics), your CI/CD pipeline (how deployments work), your monitoring dashboard (what gets tracked), and your database (basic SQL queries). Then broaden to universal concepts: REST API conventions, basic system architecture patterns, and cloud cost drivers. Avoid chasing specific technologies — focus on concepts that apply across stacks.

Score tech debt items on four dimensions: business impact if the debt causes a problem, likelihood of that problem occurring, current velocity tax (how much the debt slows feature work today), and remediation cost. Use these scores to rank debt items alongside features using the same prioritization framework. Advocate for a standing 20% allocation of sprint capacity for reliability and debt work to prevent the boom-bust cycle of accumulation and crisis remediation.

Not yet. We are working on a downloadable PDF version. For now, the web version is the most current and includes interactive links to related IdeaPlan tools, metrics, and frameworks throughout every chapter.