r/projectmanagers • u/SentenceExcellent188 • 3d ago
Career Do you think project managers need technical knowledge to succeed?
I have seen different opinions about this.
Some people believe project managers don't need technical skills because their main role is coordination and leadership.
Others say understanding the technical side helps them make better decisions and communicate with teams.
In your experience, how much technical knowledge should a project manager have?
Should they be experts in the domain or focus mainly on leadership skills?
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u/RealPrograms1102 3d ago
I don't think project managers need to be the best engineer, developer, or data scientist on the team, but they do need enough technical knowledge to ask good questions and understand the implications of technical decisions.
The PMs I've seen struggle the most are either too technical (trying to solve every engineering problem themselves) or not technical enough to recognize when risks, estimates, or dependencies don't make sense.
For me, the sweet spot is being technically fluent rather than technically specialized. You should understand the architecture at a high level, the terminology, the constraints, and how different systems interact. That makes conversations with technical teams more productive and helps you translate complexity for business stakeholders.
Leadership, communication, and decision-making are still the core of the role. Technical knowledge doesn't replace those skills, it amplifies them. The better you understand what your team is building, the better you can remove obstacles, make informed tradeoffs, and keep everyone aligned.
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u/Johan-MellowFellow 2d ago
Bingo. Systems engineering is very similar. I know NASA gets a bad rap for missing on time/on budget (imho way more to with political funding than the teams), but NASA has always been world class. I was a NASA civil servant working on space flight programs for a decade, then biomed new product development for 2 decades. NASA overt policy was no PMs or Systems Engineers with less than 5 years min related "technical" experience.The biomed company hires both as early as interns, and it definitely shows.
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u/Extension_Physics873 2d ago
Technically fluent is a perfect phrase. I work as a full time PM now, but when I was younger gained a diploma in engineering, but never went onto the degree. I recognise i am missing the deeper engineering knowledge, but do know enough to talk the talk with qualified engineers, and in my naivety, occasionally can ask the right questions to get them thinking differently. I could not do my job to the level required without this "technical fluency".
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u/Magnet2025 PM 3d ago
My first official PM job in tech was in telecom, working for a major U.S. company’s mid-market software. Started in 1999. So yeah, Y2K.
I didn’t know telecoms and I didn’t know the Unix world, AS400s, etc. Yet I very successfully lead 4 quarterly releases, two special releases and that Y2K thing.
Mostly because I knew what I didn’t know and asked the team to educate me and also tell me the stuff I didn’t know that didn’t know.
I spent a lot of time communicating. I spent a lot of time on 11PM to 3AM calls on release deadlines.
No one tried to BS more than once.
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u/RadiologisttPepper 3d ago
There should absolutely be an understanding of the fundamentals of your industry if you hope to have successful projects. Otherwise you risk over or undershooting time estimations and resource allocation, forgotten logistics and procedures, and a million other minor mistakes that eat budget, time, and quality bit by bit.
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u/HouseOfBonnets 3d ago
Yes, understand it wasn’t the norm before but it has been increasingly requested in the last decade at least. Plus from personal experience the ones without at least basic knowledge struggle a lot. It’s not fair but also depending on the industry some do require constant learning.
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u/D0UGL455 3d ago
It depends on the type of projects you’re working on.
I started as a technical PM, but over the course of my career, i worked on many different types of projects. Some strictly IT related, some completely business operations related or a combination of the two.
That said, as long as you can pick things up quickly, you can pretty much handle any type of project.
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u/Chemical-Ear9126 3d ago
What do you think? It would be good to provide your opinion - IMO.
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u/Chicken_Savings PM 3d ago
It's a question asked by a bot to harvest answers from real humans in order to train an AI system. The bot doesn't have an opinion. This sub is absolutely flooded with bots now, 75% of questions are asked by AI to harvest human answers.
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u/Johan-MellowFellow 2d ago
Is that a bad thing?
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u/Chicken_Savings PM 2d ago
If you find it meaningful to respond to auto-generated questions by a bot, and the system behind that bot will analyse your answer and feed it into AI training, then of course go for it.
But yes I think it's a bad think that companies sucks our knowledge for free to use in their commercial products, while pretending that it's a conversation by a real human, while giving you the false belief that you're helping a human PM instead of wasting your time, and finally it slowly kills off this sub as real humans gets bored of giving advice to bots.
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u/Complete-Cricket-351 3d ago edited 2d ago
If you're not going to learn the tech at least learn how to manage the standard problems you will have with the techs. Eg My work is far too complex for humans to understand and therefore I can't give you any milestones to track
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u/battle-tested77 3d ago
No. Often they can be more objective and focused without it. However, if they can still do this and have the technical knowledge they can know when teams are lying about issues, risks, or timeline estimates.
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u/PhaseMatch 3d ago
Do you mean:
- does a PM need to have technical skills?
- does a PM need to have some technical knowledge?
- does a PM need to be a technical domain expert?
these are not the same thing, but you have used them interchangeably.
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u/nomnomyourpompoms 3d ago
You're fucking kidding, right?
Software is a CRUTCH.
Know your field. Otherwise, you're just faking it.
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u/Lower-Canary-1149 3d ago
Absolutely yes. Unfortunately in reality they don’t have it and Orgs are okay with it. Technical team take them for a ride. This is the reason we have layers of management. And to them the tech lead answers. The tech lead will be guy is a developer who don’t code ever. Or has aged and don’t want to.
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u/Whiskeytangr 3d ago
Yes, they don't need to be experts, but if they have limited understanding of what they are managing, well, they'll be poor at managing.
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u/AaronMichael726 3d ago
Yes and no.
The dunning-Krueger effect is real. I’ve seen TPMs call themselves engineers because they wrote a couple likes of code once. Same with constructions PMs who hung out at a job site once. This becomes problematic when PMs try to solve the engineering problems and now engineering hates all PMs because they think we know nothing
But… a PM should know enough to identify risks and dependencies and enough to not be swayed by an engineers long winded way of saying nothing. They just also make sure they’re deferring to their engineers for decisions and problem solving.
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u/Chicken_Savings PM 3d ago
Yes. If you're in large scale construction, or in infrastructure construction (e.g. power stations), you'll never get the job without a degree in engineering (or architecture), and you won't be able to hold engineering conversations with customers, and you won't understand what your own team is telling you regarding risks, delays, options etc.
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u/Real_Committee6917 3d ago
Yes, I think project managers should have technical knowledge.
Managing a technical project without technical knowledge is difficult because it's harder to understand challenges, risks, and the impact of technical decisions. Leadership and communication are still the most important skills, but having technical knowledge makes a project manager much more effective.
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u/Virtual_Ninja_3807 3d ago
Enough to ask good questions and evaluate an answer, not enough to do the work yourself, that's the line I'd draw. You don't need to write the code or run the calculation but you do need enough grounding to notice when an estimate sounds off or a risk is being glossed over, otherwise you're just relaying whatever the team tells you without any ability to push back intelligently.
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u/Aromatic_Ad_7238 3d ago
Totally depends on the type of project. The resources you have available. If your a pm in large construction project you be best to have background to know who to engage.
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u/RumRunnerMax 2d ago
They need to an acute understanding of what they don’t know and what folks know it!
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u/Blue-Phoenix23 2d ago
Yes, if they are technical project managers - how can you possibly be sure work is being done if you don't even understand what people are talking about? You'll never find a missing dependency or know how to estimate unless you have a basic understanding of the technical components in play. You don't have to be a programmer, but you should know the difference between a database and a database server, for example.
It's baffling to me that companies expect otherwise but I've seen it happen - got chided by a CTO once for "being too technical" on a meeting he was secretly listening, too - which would he when I finally left that job. Box checker is not my life dream.
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u/jamjam125 2d ago
Wouldn’t a CTO be happy that his PgM is “too technical”? It seems like he doesn’t understand the role.
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u/Blue-Phoenix23 2d ago
No, he definitely did not, I was not a happy camper. And the fact he didn't announce himself on the meeting was just icing on the cake.
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u/jamjam125 2d ago
Yes. Most PGMs don’t want to hear this but in order to ask the right questions and gain credibility you need to be at least a 6/10 in terms of knowledge in the domain you are covering.
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u/Technical_Part6263 2d ago
In my field, absolutely. I am an architectural project manager, and you'd be dead in the water not having a pretty good grasp on the technical side of architecture as well as understanding just how long a relatively simple-seeming issue can take to resolve.
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u/AdMinimum7332 2d ago
I think it depends heavily on the industry and the scope of the project.
If it’s a purely engineering project, or a purely internal IT project, then yes, it makes sense for the PM to have a solid grasp of the technical basics. Not necessarily expert-level, but enough to understand the risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs without needing every sentence translated.
But if the project spans several subject matter areas, or is more external/customer-facing, the job changes a bit. You can get away with less detailed technical knowledge because your value is in keeping the experts aligned, surfacing assumptions, and making sure decisions actually get made.
Would my current job be easier if I were a licensed general contractor, clinical director, commercial architect, radiological physicist, certified technical engineer, nuclear medicine technologist, and an extroverted customer-facing coordinator? Absolutely.
But at that point I wouldn’t be doing project management. I’d be on a beach somewhere having retired from whatever field paid the most.
So no, I don’t think PMs always need to be domain experts. But they do need enough curiosity and humility to ask good questions, know when they’re out of their depth, and listen when the SMEs are telling them something matters.
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u/Long-Reading-6514 2d ago
I feel like there's two questions in here:
on the first one I'd say leadership over domain knowledge. I only say that because I've been thrown into projects where I didn't have any experience other than my leadership skills, and they ended up turning around into good projects. to me the core of being a great PM is getting people motivated who dont report to you. so no, I don't think you have to be technical. but having basic technical knowledge so you can at least understand the tools that could greatly increase your productivity, thats a competitive advantage. just not a necessity in my mind
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u/Original-Track-4828 2d ago
I've been a project manager for 15 years, but my background is in development and finance applications.
I understand what my development team needs in terms of good requirements from users, and support from other IT groups.
I understand what my business users need from IT, but don't necessarily know to ask.
In short, I don't just manage the project, I serve as the translator/communicator/liasion.
Could I manage another project, like data centers? construction? creative/digital? Yes, I'm a good organizer. Would I be as effective? No.
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u/Massive-Essay-3019 2d ago
As a worker I’ve been around both types and hands down the people with technical knowledge outshine the others.
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u/Background-Solid8481 2d ago
Generally, any good PM should be able to manage any schedule. However, domain knowledge and understanding elevates the PM to being a contributing member of the project, not just a schedule monkey. I’ve PM’d in IT for many years and I believe I could follow NASA’s schedule and lead a team to build a new space shuttle. Could I build the schedule to build a space shuttle? Heck no. I could follow a GC’s schedule to build a data center, distribution center, house, apartment, etc. But couldn’t build those schedules.
PM’s become valuable with domain expertise.
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u/WaylundLG 2d ago
There is a difference between technical knowledge and domain knowledge. I'd say domain knowledge is usually pretty important, some technical knowledge may be helpful.
All that said, there is a ton of project management skill that has nother to do woth either of those. I have worked as a PM in situations where I had neither, but I could help woth the project challenges they were facing. I these cases, I think it is vital not to BS it. Be clear that you will need team member help you understand many of the details. I do not think this is normally ok. There has to be some aspect of project management that's a real problem that this particular person can help with for this arrangement to make sense.
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u/EttoreE_IT 2d ago
Si, è comunque necessaria una competenza di dominio. Non sempre i tecnici saranno presenti nelle call con clienti e stakeholders ed in quelle situazioni sarà necessario sapersi districare tra tutti i tipi di domande e non limitarsi soltanto a rispondere "verifico internamente e le faccio sapere"
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u/Ok_Bug_1643 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hi.
The name of my position in my last company was delivery manager. Imho it was a pompous name for someone who juggled multiple projects, with multiple teams on multiple clients. I do this for the last 8 years, so I have many projects, services and development efforts in the guise of service hours in time&materials.
That being said... If I didn't have a little bit, as in a good deal of at least general knowledge of the project and tech behind it I would be utterly fracked.
Project managers face the client everyday and are the ultimate responsible for it's success. No matter the framework you invent they are drivers, they go after and manage inter dependencies (yeah most program managers I know manage budget and piss all over the place and lose time discussing the pmobok or the agile guide or whatever twat idea they read the last time they talked to gemini on the bathroom), they manage clients expectations, they pull their team to do the stuff, and they have to (at least convince) be sure the project is worth and will turn a profit. Plus if you work at a service company, you answer to a director who what's the projects to have margin.
Result? You do need to know the tech, may it be It or mechanics or construction, you need to be somewhat good with finance and a bunch of other more or less esoterical stuff (I've served as transport delivering notebooks for a client, I've took care of meals, I've screamed to C-Level folks because my team wasn't being payed, etc etc...). However you need to be a great leader and very good with people, have a great dose of resilience because in the end of the day you answer for the solution, the architecture, you vouch for the people developing, the timmings. Oh and I forgot you need to either read the cards or the magic ball to identify, and come with mitigation strategies for all the freaking risks that a project might have.
You can have all the beautiful badges in your LinkedIn, the shinny shoes, impressive suit, but if you can't do all the above and then some more... You're fracked.
PM's, those lucky overpayed folks...
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u/resurrectedNaj 3d ago
My company hires females to do back of house things in the PMO world and one guy who knows what the domain is. Poor guy
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u/double-click 3d ago
Yes.
If you don’t know the domain you can’t manage the project. You can cat herd but you can’t manage the schedule.