100% agree. This is the biggest debate I have with other PM's who say "you don't need to be technical"... Total bullshit.
You're expecting to be able to engage with your engineering team around the relative effort and complexities of different technical solutions... You're gonna need to have an understanding of the underlying technical details.
The way I see it, I don't necessarily need to know how to build the thing (as in, all the implementation details). But I absolutely need to know how the thing we're building works, what all the key moving parts are, and how they relate to each other.
Without that, there's no way I can develop any kind of intuition as to what is and isn't possible, which is CRITICAL when managing expections with customers or internal stakeholders.
You're expecting to be able to engage with your engineering team around the relative effort and complexities of different technical solutions... You're gonna need to have an understanding of the underlying technical details.
The way I see it, I don't necessarily need to know how to build the thing (as in, all the implementation details). But I absolutely need to know how the thing we're building works, what all the key moving parts are, and how they relate to each other.
Without that, there's no way I can develop any kind of intuition as to what is and isn't possible, which is CRITICAL when managing expections with customers or internal stakeholders.