"I'm not technical enough" is Rarely the Real Problem
Rather than jumping to trying to be more technical, find the underlying issue this feedback is masking, and solve that instead.
(Dog or Bunny? Teddy the Corgi, Barcelona, Spain)
Yue’s Coaching Corner
Now enrolling for the Feb of my Maven course: Unleash Your Leadership Superpower. Use SUB20 for 20% off. Rated 5/5 by past students!
If you’re in Barcelona on Jan 22, I’ll be giving an in-person talk on product careers with ProductTank BCN. Register here. 200 people & counting.
Hosting an Meet the Coach & AMA on Jan 30 for The Uncommon Executive Leadership Accelerator. Come hear my talk live about the program and get your questions answered!
Client: “I’m not technical enough.” My manager tells me that he gets feedback from others that I need to be more technical. My CTO writes code. Most of my peers have a technical background. What do I do?
I hear this at least once a month from clients across all backgrounds. A Staff PM with a CS/Engineering degree wants to relearn coding. An SVP of Data with a Math & CS degree wants to brush up on data modeling. A Director of Innovation who is the visionary at his company wants to learn Python.
Most people ask me this question because their intuition tells them that it’s not the best path or that it’s not truly the problem. “It just doesn’t feel like the best use of my time” or “I don’t feel this will solve anything,” they say. And they are right.
Anger is a secondary emotion. It masks true underlying emotions like fear, embarrassment, or injustice. “You’re not technical enough” is a secondary problem statement. It masks other underlying issues:
lack of trust from technical team members
lack of trust from leadership in your ideas and decisions
Your communications with the team or leadership is unclear
the pace of delivery is too slow
the quality of work is too low
there is an overall lack of technical expertise in the organization
Rather than jumping to solve the “be more technical” problem, go one layer deeper and identify the problem behind the problem. What would “being more technical” help you do? Why is that important for you to achieve?
Case study: Director In A New Technical Space
A client who is a senior director of product recently took on a more technical team focused on long-term platform architecture decisions. He has a computer science background and was an engineer for 8 years. Yet he felt he needed to be more technical and was considering courses.
When we probed further, it turned out that there was a lack of technical leadership in the area and he was having difficulty gaining the trust of key team members.
Rather than being that technical leader, we thought it was faster and better to hire for that skill set. He made a case for and hired a strong senior architect for the team, who provided the technical leadership his team sorely needed.
With strong technical leadership, the team looked to him for more vision and strategy. These played into his leadership strengths. He built trust with his team by clarifying the vision and actively removing collaboration roadblocks.
Case study: Staff PM Improving Delivery
Another client was a staff PM at a startup who was recently given feedback by her manager that she needed to be more technical. She has been working in the same product space for 8 years and does not have an engineering background.
The underlying issue was that product delivery had slowed in the last quarter. The company had just gone through multiple quarters of switching product strategy and hacking together MVPs. This inevitably led to messy code and non-scalable infrastructure where small changes took weeks. She was planning to sign up for a Python course, which likely would not solve this problem.
Rather than learning how to code, I urged her to help the engineering leaders document and articulate the technical challenges in a way that resonated with non-technical leadership. So she set up one-on-one meetings where they would explain the engineering challenges in detail, and she would ask questions as a non-technical person. Together, they created the business case for prioritizing specific infrastructure improvements. We also made sure that she would co-lead the presentations to leadership.
“You’re so technical!” was one of the comments in her next performance feedback. =)
Case study: VP Growth “fitting in”
A client of mine was a very successful VP of Growth. The CEO, CTO, and VP of Product that he works with all have strong computer science backgrounds. They frequently dive deep into technical discussions during executive meetings and “nerd out” over the latest technologies socially. With a background in data and strategy, he felt like an outsider and wanted to be a trusted partner to the group.
The Uncommon Executive is a subscriber-supported publication. Paid subscribers get the following:
Access to posts older than 6 months
A signed copy of my book (limited copies)
Love and gratitude from me for supporting my writings
Free videos and content from my courses (Q2’25 release)
If you’re interested, grab your 7-day free trial today!
Rather than focusing on trying to match their technical knowledge, I encouraged the VP of Growth to lean into their shared love for debating new ideas and trying new tools. He had a passion for philosophy and regular poker player. He began to prompt discussions about how to best motivate teams (intrinsic vs extrinsic?) or the best strategy to win against competitors (buy, build, partner?). He also initiated some casual poker games after work hours, with increasing enthusiasm from the entire leadership team.
This not only shifted the dynamics with the three executives but the rest of the leadership team as well. It turns out he was not the only one struggling with the overly technical discussions. This VP of Growth was credited with improving the morale and performance of the company that quarter and was promoted to Chief Revenue Officer shortly after.
Remember, “being technical” is a mask for other symptoms. When you focus on the underlying problem instead, you will find more ways to address the situation in a way that aligns with your leadership strengths and career goals.
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14 pm.
Yue
I like this Yue. I’ve seen a lot of emerging leaders lean more into technical rather than leadership skills. I always thought it was similar to the “what got you here won’t get you there” with future leaders leaning more on what was … understandable and familiar.
After reading your post it made me think that it’s also easy feedback to give about poor leadership. “They’re not quite leading … they mustn’t have the technical skills”.
I think learning leadership skills is often harder than technical … so like you, think we should lean in more .. not mask it with more tech skills.
Thank you for the thoughtful post
I cannot agree more !
Most of the time these unhelpful vague feedback were given by people who don't exactly know what they complain about, nor they have the skills themselves. I have never heard an engineer say a PM/designer/Marketer is not technical enough, for example.
As a team, I do think each role should try to understand another role's common language and basic principles in each other's work. However, it's not necessary to acquire that skills yourself (unless you are really interested, ofc) At the end of the day, we work as a team and supplement each other's skills, don't we?