(2024-07-03) Procopio This Is The Number1 Tech Skill You Need To Compete Right Now

Joe Procopio: This Is the Number 1 Tech Skill You Need to Compete Right Now. I know that there are already a million articles loudly uncovering the one true tech skill necessary to survive the AI job-cut reckoning

Here’s the problem. Those million articles are mostly garbage.

Half of those million articles will tell you that the answer to avoiding tech industry redundancy lies somewhere in AI

The other half of those million articles are rooted in some feel-good platitude nonsense. Like “Become a team player!” (high agency!)

Last week, I wrote an article about why the tech industry is no longer building things customers want. In it, I talked about listening to your customer. And here again, it would be feel-good platitude nonsense to just barf out “Listen to your customer!” The truth is, as I pointed out in the article, the customer is often wrong, because the customer knows only pain and symptoms, not causes and solutions.

Then I said, “Tech companies have always been slow to hire people with the skills, experience, and knowledge to translate pain and symptoms into causes and solutions.”

Well, to simplify it, those skills I highlighted can be classified as true, actual, verifiable product management.

you probably have the wrong idea of what product management is. Especially as it relates to tech. I’m almost sure of it.

Product management is not project management. Well, maybe it is, in some sense. Maybe I need to give up this battle. Because I’ve been fighting it for 25 years and I’m losing. The business side is still conflating the two.

*Another thing I said in that same article from above is, “It used to be that tech things were produced by tech people and sold to other tech people.”

That era saw the dawn of project management, a process that the business side invented to reel in costs while delivering quality software on deadline.*

somewhere near the end of the 1990s, we all kind of figured out that everyone was going to have access to tech soon, and if we didn’t start building tech for people who don’t care about tech, we’d be cooked.

Product managers are not concerned with deadlines and budgets. Well, they can be, but it’s not their primary function. The primary function of a product manager is to deliver a valuable product to the customers who need it.

Here’s the job. Define “valuable.” Define “need.” Define “customer.” That’s the primary function of a product manager.*

Project managers live and die by the project management Triangle — a triangle whose three sides are time, quality, and cost. The logic is: “Good, fast, cheap–choose two.”

But project management has nothing to do with success. Project management is all about not failing.

technical project management mutated from the pushing of pencils to a pseudo-science and then to a religion. Today, that religion is called Jira.

In Tech, a Successful Product Comes Down to Elegance. The more elegant your solution, from infrastructure to code to processing, as it relates to customer needs, pain, and symptoms, the more value can be delivered to generate more revenue and profit.

I’ve created another simple Triangle for product management: you have sides for revenue, value, and elegance. And the logic is more Pythagorean. When you increase value and elegance, you get an even bigger increase in revenue or profit.

And to be completely clear: GenAI sucks at elegance.

So maybe I need to remove all the quibbling. Let’s not even call it product management. Let’s call it product engineering. This is where software engineers should be focused. This is the practice they should evolve into as their career progresses. Software engineering knowledge and experience should be required for the job.

I’m not saying this is what the business side is looking for right now–they still don’t totally understand it. But the business needs these skills yesterday, and these skills are going to come from the tech side, not the business side.