One Knight in Product

Building Effective Technical Skills for Product Managers (with Irene Yu, founder @ Skiplevel)

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An interview with Irene Yu. Irene is a former software developer for up-and-coming everything store Amazon, where she found herself mentoring non-technical product managers to help them get better at tech. Inspired by her success, she left to found Skiplevel, a technical training startup aimed at teach actually useful tech skills to product managers & non tech founders.

We talk about a lot, including:

  • The mission behind Skiplevel and how she's trying to provide a good and easy place to learn useful technical knowledge for non-engineering tech workers
  • What being technical means, why being technical is helpful, and the importance of giving PMs and founders confidence to have constructive conversations with engineering
  • The target audience for Skiplevel and whether it's suitable for the wider business or focused relentlessly on PMs and founders
  • Why learning to code is not the best way to learn technical skills and how learning a broad set of technical concepts is superior
  • The four pillars of technical knowledge that Skiplevel teaches and how they contribute to helping people go wide not deep
  • Whether product managers even need to be technical, whether coding interviews are appropriate, and why companies use them
  • The potential risks of people knowing enough to contribute but not enough to make decisions, but then trying to make them anyway

    • And much more!

    Check out Skiplevel

    If you want to get better at tech & go beyond learning how to code toy apps for the sake of it, why not check out Skiplevel.co?

    Contact Irene

    You can reach out to Irene on Twitter.

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