I am currently working as a Technical Product Manager in a huge innovative IT company, and I asked myself: what’s the difference between technical and non-technical product management?

Let’s ask Google who’s a technical product manager. We’ll see quite similar definitions that say: that’s the same product manager but with advanced engineering skills, good technical background, with more focus on technical side of the product and communicating more with technical part of the team (developers mostly). See HubSpot, CareerExplorer, ProductPlan.

So ‘technical’ in fact means an additional set of skills for an ‘ordinary’ product manager. No ‘technicality’ can atone for lack of basic product management skills: data analysis, market analysis, customer research, product growth strategy etc.
If so, how important are these additional skills and why employers look much more frequently for ‘ordinary’ product managers than technical ones? For example, right now I did a quick search on LinkedIn vacancies: 36739 results for ‘product manager’ and 5128 for ‘technical product manager’.

Given that not every employer means the same by this position title, either they don’t see additional value in technical skills or these skills are indeed unnecessarily extra.

Who are technical managers here in Yandex? Technical product managers here are responsible for complicated products for developers: database management, cloud services, distributed computing, resource management tools, you name it. Key detail here is that our products’ users are not just everybody on the street: our users are developers and analytics, so in order to understand the demand and communicate effectively with them, product managers themselves must be on a close level of technical proficiency.

We don’t write production code, but we have to know how it is written, what patterns and technologies exist, what are the basic scenarios and requirements. Managers are not high-level abstract order-issuing entities: we work closely with the team, we contribute to technical design decisions, we communicate details to multiple stakeholders and partner services — who are again all developer-oriented.

Why would a company need a technical product manager instead of an ‘ordinary’ one? If it’s a product for common people, like fintech, ride hailing, deliveries and subscriptions of any kind? I’d say that with similar product skills a technical manager will be more efficient in team communications, product design, will understand in detail not only ‘what it does and why’ but also ‘how it works’. In my opinion that’s important, but then I am not an employer =)

Does the market know better or does it just not realize potential usefulness of technical background in product managers?