Here's where you can start in your journey to Upskill as a non-technical product manager
As a product manager, if you're not growing, you're wilting. Your basket of skills needs to keep expanding with tools, insights and techniques that you can leverage for the eagle's view that PMs are expected to have.
You do not need to be the CR7 of your product, your superpower should be more focused on how you bring in the Ronaldos, Serenas and Beyoncès in your immediate team and greater org to play together. Still, for you to know how to orchestrate like the pro you are, you have to know your keyboard.
Here's some skills you need to learn so you can serve your team well:
Data Analytics
You need to be able to follow what's happening in your product. What are the key metrics you're optimising for and how's the movement looking? Are your users dropping off like flies or should you be thinking about a glorious IPO and that hidden island you've been fantasising about.
You need to be able to segment your users, relate different datasets to pull out specific insight and more than that, you need to be able to communicate the key take-aways from those numbers and what it means for the next strategic steps.
Some great starting points to your data journey is SQL, Excel, Tableau and PowerBI. If you'd like to play around with code, dip your feet into Python and see what magic it can do for you.
You can learn these skills very affordably (or close to free) from DataCamp, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera and Udemy.
Project Management
Yes, yes... we know product management is different from project management. In an ideal world, there would be a surgically clean delineation between what you do in product and what project managers should do. However, a lot of times, you could be required to pull out some project skills to perform well.
Your ability to make product-adjacent plans with specific timelines, your knowledge of collaboration tools like Asana, Jira and Trello, budgeting resources, etc will come in handy when you have a product to run and sometimes people to manage.
You do not need a PMP certification, just arm yourself with a one-day online course that will teach you what you need to know.
User Experience Management
As a PM, your heartbeat needs to align with that of your user. You always want to build for the people who power your product. This means that as much as is possible, you need to consistently aim for excellence in the four-part User Experience test: Usable, Enjoyable, Equitable (or accessible) and useful.
While being great at this skill could include being able to wireframe user journeys on tools like Figma or Miro (or a piece of paper), a big chunk of it is your ability to talk to your users, to observe how they're using your product (sometimes in person), to actually source for complaints about your product and to do your darnedest to polish it up into something that is delightful to use.
Google has an excellent course on User Experience Design. Check it out.
Design Thinking
I once heard a story where some non-profit went to dig a borehole in a remote desert in an African country so that they could save the women from having to walk 5km to and fro the river. Sounds really altruistic, impactful and thoughtful, innit? Except a week or so later, the brand new borehole was poisoned and the women resumed their daily 5km treks to the original water source. Wild.
Thing is, had the good non-profit folks actually talked to the women, they would know that the daily trek was their daily break. They could get together, talk girl stuff, provide emotional and social support to each other and only focus on themselves. Taking away this experience from them was not a favour. It was detrimental to their well being.
Design thinking is the process you would use to co-create solutions with your end users. It begins with empathising with your user's needs. This could sometimes look like spending time, physically with them in their natural environment and observing how they go about their daily lives, what problems they face and how they solve them, and having non-leading conversations with them.
As a P.M, a design thinking mindset will help you build something people want, and not get your brand new well poisoned. If you have the budget, you can learn it from Harvard Online here. Or you could take this workshop from the Project Management Institute.
Remember:
Learning and Innovation go hand-in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow- William Pollard.