Organizations that provide technology based products and services typically require product managers to have a fairly strong technical background. They need to translate business requirements to a technical audience (namely their engineering counterparts) and also understand the impact of choices made in development to the end product (reduced scalability, increased COGS, architectural trade-offs etc). Finding product managers that understand the underlying technology, as well as have strong experience in the business domain within which these companies operate in, is quite often like finding a unicorn, as it is rare to find product professionals that have skills and experience in both.
With the advent of no code products in the market, organizations and startups are now able to bring tech products and services to market faster without having to build every single component from scratch and no longer having to deal with the maintenance and scalability issues that come with supporting the basic building blocks for the product. By using no code tools, products and services, companies can be lean in their development resources (especially in this highly competitive market for tech talent) while focusing on their core competencies.
What does that mean for Product Management within tech companies as they adopt no code products and services? The technical requirement for product managers at these tech companies, that adopt no code technologies as their basic building blocks, will become less relevant. Instead product managers will need to be more business oriented and need not be as technically proficient as they are today. This will open up product management as a career option to many more individuals who have a lot of experience and expertise within various business domains, and without a heavy technical background. Product managers will be able to focus even more on other aspects of product management such as analyzing data, understanding their users and the market, developing an optimal user experience, etc without the constraints (both time and resources) and distractions of having to build the underlying technology to support their product strategy and roadmap.
Now, one might argue that not all organizations will want to rely on third party services and products due to the reliability issues that may come with it, and instead want to build in house. These companies may achieve this by creating separate business units that build the underlying services, but that is a trade-off that will become less and less attractive, similar to the build your own data centre vs public cloud decision.
Let me know your thoughts and how you think product management will evolve with the advent of no code in the comments below.