A self-paced guide
Engineering Literacy
for Product Managers
You don't need to write code. But you do need to ask better engineering questions, scope realistically, and make smarter technical decisions when working with engineering teams. This guide gives you exactly that — no code prerequisites, just clear intuition framed around the decisions PMs actually face.
Work in progress. Chapters 1–6 are written and live; later chapters are still being drafted. Feedback on the published ones is welcome — there's a 👍/👎 widget at the end of each chapter and a tip jar if you want to nudge me to write faster.
Chapters
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
Why PMs Need This
The cost of being technically illiterate as a PM, and what this guide will (and won't) teach you.
"Should we build this?"
Feasibility and complexity literacy — how engineers actually estimate effort and risk.
"How long will it take?"
Why estimates lie — ranges, uncertainty, padding, and how to read an eng estimate.
"Build or buy?"
Vendors, libraries, in-house — the economics and lock-in tradeoffs.
"Monolith or microservices?"
The architecture choice every growing product faces — and what each costs you.
"Why is it slow?"
Latency, throughput, bottlenecks — reading performance from a PM lens.
"Why did it break?"
Reliability, incidents, on-call, SLAs, blameless postmortems.
"Is this ready to ship?"
Testing & QA — automated tests, regression risk, when "good enough" is good enough.
"Can we ship this safely?"
Feature flags, canary rollouts, blue/green, rollback.
"What does it cost to run this?"
Cloud bills, infra cost literacy, why "just spin up another server" matters.
11
"Why don't we have data on this?"
Observability — logs, metrics, traces, instrumentation, why your dashboard is empty.
12
"Is this secure?"
Security tradeoffs, common attack surfaces, what makes a feature risky.
13
"Should we pay down this debt?"
Tech debt — what it actually is, when paying it pays off, how to negotiate it.
14
"Web, mobile, or both?"
Platform decisions, native vs cross-platform, App Store realities.
15
"Collaborating with engineering"
Specs that engineers actually use, code review etiquette for PMs, escalation patterns.
Who this is for
Practicing product managers who work with engineering teams and want to be sharper partners — better at scoping, prioritizing, pushing back, and shipping. No code prerequisites. No CS degree assumed.