Diagnosing the Economics of Your Code

Managers regularly have to contribute to technical decisions where the specific subject matter is substantially beyond their understanding. This applies even to managers who have a technical background. Technology changes over time, and nobody can be familiar with every programming language and tool chain. And that’s okay. A good product manager, like any good manager, has a skillful touch for helping teams do what they want to do while aligning their work with what’s economically important for the product. Whether team members are designers, developers, testers, site reliability engineers (SREs), or platform engineers, the product manager's role is not to tell them how to do their jobs. Instead, managers need to understand what performance characteristics their team's product pipeline needs, and use that focus to facilitate purposeful discussions with collaborators about how to best effectuate those needs from what's available and opportune for those particular collaborators. To do this effectively, product managers need to understand enough about the fundamentals of digital infrastructure to ask probing, intentional questions about the role and characteristics of a given technology. This note will help students do that.