Welcome everyone um to uh the second day of the women's Tech Global Conference and today's talk on technical literacy for non engineering roles. This is a topic that I am really passionate about and I spend a lot of my time uh talking and thinking about.So I'm really excited to share my insights and my tips with you all today. Uh This talk is going to be perfect for you if you are interviewing for any role at a tech company that values tech knowledge. So roles like product management, project management. If you're marketing, if you're in sales, if you're in operations, if you're in customer success, or if you are a non technical start up founder, or if you have aspirations of being one, it's perfect for you if you work closely with engineering teams. So if you need to communicate with them in any way, collaborate them. And, and that is just uh a part of your role. If you write about technology, if you're a technical content writer and you want to uh understand technology and software better, this is for you. Uh If you ever have to explain software products from a tech perspective. Uh So for example, if you're in a client facing role, if you're in a customer success role, and you need to be able to speak confidently about the software or help troubleshoot your product. And really just if you want to feel more confident about your tech skills, because you feel that technology and being technical is going to be a big uh part of your career moving forward, right? Then this talk is gonna be for you.

Uh So here's the agenda for today's talk first, we're going to cover what it means to be technical. So no doubt you've heard the word before used before. And uh you will also learn why taking a coding class is the least effective way to become more technical. I'm gonna jump into introducing the four technical skills framework for how to think about what it means to be more technical. And we're gonna end with three ways that you can improve your tech skills and your knowledge and none of them involves taking a coding class. All right.

All right. Uh So before we jump into it, uh here's a little bit about me, I'm just gonna, you know, talk a little bit about me. So, hi, everyone. My name is Irene Yu. I am the founder and a tech mentor at Skip level.co. Um and I help nonen engineering professionals and companies and teams improve their knowledge and their tech skills in order to build more confidence in today's tech centric world. Uh I'm also a full stack software engineer. I have worked at a very wide array uh range of companies from ad agencies, mid-sized start ups, um large national um companies where I was building highly scalable applications on the front end and on the back end, I want to share with you a little bit about my story throughout my career as a software engineer, I've worked with many, many non technical product managers uh for those of you who are um not sure what the PM role is.

It is a role that works very closely with software engineers to plan and to ship software. I started uh tech mentoring a product manager that I worked with at Amazon. Uh In 2019, this meant I was holding biweekly meetings with her going over technical documentation and answering questions that she was afraid to ask during engineering meetings. And this was a really a really eye opening experience for me. Um There were many things that I thought were common knowledge and for the first time I realized that they were not actually common knowledge. And I came to the realization that while engineers have the opportunity every day to learn technology, that's really not the case for non engineering roles. And in fact, technical knowledge today is created for developers and it really was not created for the non engineering role.

So in 2020 I started working full time on skip level where my, my um my thought is to uh make technical skills and knowledge more accessible for everyone. And not just that, uh I'm really proud to say that since Skip Level uh launched last year, I've helped over 200 non engineering professionals and teams improve their tech skills and their knowledge. Um including working with companies like IBM and Whole Foods and professionals that work at companies like Amazon and Stripe and Facebook. So, with all of my expertise, working with and tech, um um uh I'm sorry. So with all of my expertise, working with product managers, my expertise as a developer, I've put together this talk today to share with you uh some of my insights and my tips uh before we dive in some uh quick housekeeping items, before we start, this is a 35 minute talk about with uh five minutes of Q and A at the end.

So feel free to leave at any time. But if you stay until the end, I will share with you a special one time offer for the Skip Global Program that I would love for you to take advantage of. Uh you can ask uh questions at any time in the Q and A box. Uh And please share your thoughts with me throughout the presentation. I really want to hear your thoughts. Uh Gabe is my team member and he will be on hand to answer any questions. Uh So Gabe do you want to just quickly jump on camera wave to everyone, just say hi there he is. Hi, Gabe, everyone. Awesome. Thank you so much, Gabe. Um If there's a question that Gabe cannot answer, I will go through them at the last five minutes of Q and A. Um And if we run out of time, you can always reach me on social media or book a coaching call with me. I'm more than happy to talk to you guys. I love talking to people in the industry. Um Cool. All right. Now that we have housekeeping out of the way, let's go ahead and dive right in. So I want to start with what does it mean to be technical? In other words, what is technical literacy in the tech industry? So here's the formal definition, tech literacy is your ability to assess to acquire and to communicate information pertaining to the building and the maintenance of software. So here's a myth about tech literacy.

Many people think that coding and being technical is the same thing. And therefore many of us try to become more technical by taking a coding class in reality, knowing how to code is not the same as being technical. OK? They are two separate skills saying that someone must know how to code in order to be technical is kind of like saying you have to be a basketball player in order to know what a free throw is, but you don't need to be a basketball player to understand how the game of basketball works, right?

And so it's the same concept. You don't have to be a developer to understand technology and software and how it works, right? So what's the truth, the truth is that taking a coding class is actually the least effective way to become more technical. Uh Gabe's gonna open up a pool and uh just let me know if you've taken a coding class before to become more technical. And if so in which programming language, when you take a coding class, what you're really learning is the syntax of a specific program language, right? So you're learning things like how do I assign a variable in Python or how do I write a for loop uh in C++ right? Taking a coding class focuses on going really deep into the ins and outs of coding in a specific language, which is really not the same thing as knowing how to build an application because so much more goes into building software than just coding. If your goal is to become a developer, then you will have to learn how to code, right? But if your goal is to be technical, then taking a coding class is going to be the least effective way to achieve that goal. So uh you might be wondering why is technical literacy uh important for nonen engineering roles in the first place? Uh after all, since uh you're not a developer, you don't have a direct role in building software, right?

So almost half of all tech company roles are actually non technical in nature. So non technical roles include roles like product management, project management, UXU I, data sales, customer, uh success operations, business development. And while these non engineering roles do not build software directly, they all work on software in one way or another. So these roles either have an important role in the selling of software, buying software planning, software designing software, right? That's UX and graphic design, maintaining of software, working with software teams or interfacing with software customers. Yet, despite this fact, 50% of the workforce in the software industry have little to no technical literacy and most have never received any training in technical literacy and no matter what role you're in. If you work in the software tech uh uh tech space, then having tech skills can only benefit you. It's never going to be a con, right? It's always gonna be a pro. So take the product management role, for example, product and project managers work very closely with DEV teams to plan and to build software. Tech uh be more um having more tech skills will help you write better business requirements that help developers know what to build.

And therefore there's less back and forth right between DEV teams and the product manager. Uh Being more technical also allows product managers to communicate better with non engineering teams which then helps them gain their engineering team's trust, their respect and their influence, which is really a very big game changer for product managers. The uh the the big part of P MS role is also product timeline, right? So having an understanding um of technology and software helps them be uh be able to gauge how long and how much a feature or product will take to build. Right along with thinking about the feasibility of a requirement and what is the scope of work for that requirement that is um needed. Tech uh Being more technical is also extremely beneficial for six for um um for roles in sales and um in any roles where you have to talk to um the client, right? For example, uh being better able to answer customer questions about a software product, especially if the product itself is technical in nature such as a soft product um or like an API product, right?

Having technical skills and knowledge also better enables customer success teams to troubleshoot issues without relying on a DEV team. So this saves a lot of time and frustration for everyone, especially the customer. And then finally sales and customer success teams are usually the first to become aware of complaints and customer feature requests. When you have the right technical knowledge, you're able to better communicate these customer concerns to product managers and software teams.

So this is why um being more technical benefits, non engineering rules. So let's move on to part two now that we've learned what technical literacy is and why it's important. What are the skills are involved in being more technical? We typically think about uh being more technical as just one skill, right? In reality, it's actually a combination of four skills that together make up a person's ability to assess, to acquire and to communicate technical information. So what are these four skills? The first one is having an awareness, a broad awareness of available technologies. The second is understanding technical tradeoffs. The third is your ability to communicate using popular technical terms and lingo, which goes for both speaking and comprehending technical content.

And fourth, having an understanding of the software development life cycle, right? So this is a process of building software. So I'll talk a little bit um about these a bit more in depth. The first goal is having a broad uh uh um a broad understanding, a broad awareness of what sort of technologies are available out there. In other words, are you aware of the common tools, the services, the techniques that are used in the industry in order to design, to document, to build, to, to ship and to maintain software. Do you have a fundamental understanding of technology such that you're able to understand the use cases and the problems that these technologies solve? This is gonna help you in uh in a few areas. But um history specifically first if you have the skill, uh you have a general sense, a general sense kind of like a mental road map of what are the capabilities and the limitations of technology. This mental context is really important in order to ask the right questions, well informed questions and have a frame of reference during technical discussions.

So being able to communicate and to comprehend what is being said during technical discussions, right, once you get enough practice in this area, you can then use your mental toolbox to contribute ideas and suggestions during technical discussions on how to solve a problem or build a feature using different technologies.

Yes, just because you are not a developer, you can contribute ideas and suggestions during a technical discussion. It is very much welcomed as long as you know what you're talking about, right? Uh Here's a quick example of what I mean by having a mental toolbox uh of um tech. Uh So for example, slow browsing uh and loading speeds for web applications is actually a very common issue for teams, but there are many techniques and tools that the industry uses to solve latency, right? So slowness. Um So for example, um different forms of things like caching, uh things like server side rendering or incremental loading. These are all techniques that the industry often uses in order to solve the issue of slow browsing speeds. A K A latency as someone who is tech savvy, you're able to understand these technologies and know what problems they solve and how to communicate about them versus someone who is not technical, they would not be aware of these different technologies or how to speak about them.

And therefore probably have difficulty keeping up during techno uh tech talks with dev teams, right? So understanding the fundamentals of technology and the available tools that are out there to solve different problems. That is what it means to have a broad awareness of available technologies.

Let's move on to skill. Number two, skill number two is having a mental map of what technologies are available to solve what problems. And this helps um improve uh skill number two, which is evaluating technical tradeoffs. So what are uh so are you aware of the common technical tradeoffs? Right. Are you able to evaluate the different strategies for building software based on these tradeoffs? When we build a product, we can look at it from many different angles including what are the business goals of this product, right. So that's Biz Dev, uh we can look at it from the perspective of our users, what features do they want, but developers, they look at software from a technical perspective, balancing technical tradeoffs. And it's important to also be aware of this perspective. Uh Here's an example.

Uh let's take this app for example, right? If you've never used the mobile before, it is a very popular mobile payment app that allows uh people to transfer funds to each other, right? So it is uh so it includes features like adding and removing funds, sending uh payment, transferring balances to and from your bank. Uh let's say the DEV um has a list of these features, they're going to look at these features and they're going to look at the specific Rs, right? And they're gonna come up with different options for building and they're going to evaluate each of these options, these different ways of building based on the technical tradeoffs to then decide what is the best option to use, what is the best option uh to build. So some examples of the technical tradeoffs include whether the option is secure if it's maintainable. This is very important to the long term health of our software if it is fast, right, again, latency, if it is scalable, right? If your product grows and hopefully it does um uh and having more users, we want to make sure that it is scalable, is it felt tolerant when things go wrong? Can we bounce back? And can we bounce back quickly? It is easy to implement, right?

Because time is very important. So we always want the the option that is easiest to implement and many more, right? So this is what I mean by technical tradeoffs, this is how developers think and as a non engineering professional, you also want to be able to think in this way as well. Let's move on to skill number three, this skill is probably the most obvious, right? So the third technical skill is your ability to communicate technically, both speaking ability and comprehension. In other words, are you able to speak about a product using today's most common technical terms? And lingo at least the most common terms um out there are you able to read and comprehend technical content? So when I say technical content, it can be anything from a software diagram, reading an article to technical documentation, to api documentation. Um and to anything that's on the web, right? That's technical content. It's a very broad term. I'm gonna uh um talk a little bit more about, about this. So being able to communicate technically is actually essential to reducing assumptions that may lead to miscommunication. And this happens very often uh with developers and um with product managers or designers or customer success who don't have um the same technical language, right? A lot of uh things are being said that's kind of being missed.

I'm going to use the common terminology server as an example of miscommunication. What most people don't realize about the term server is that it's actually a bit of a dual meaning term. So its meaning changes based on the context, if you're unaware that the term server can refer to many different things, this may lead to miscommunications. So let's learn about the term server. The term server can actually refer to either hardware or software depending on the context when we are surfing the web, uh we're actually using our browser to connect to the internet, right? So whenever you enter a URL into your browser, the browser finds the server that contains the data for the web page that you want to go to. So this is the physical machine. This is the hardware that is hosting your application when the physical server is found. So this is inside the physical uh server. The request is gonna hit a software server inside the physical server. This http server uh is a very unique piece of software with special functionality for understanding URL S storing information about requests coming in, accessing files and returning responses to the browser.

So the term server can refer to either the hardware or the software depending on what is the discussion context. This sort of fundamental understanding about how the internet works and the dual meaning term server really helps give you a fuller context to discussions and prevents miscommunications.

So server is only one example of how um having a fuller understanding of technology and software and how it works will help you in communicating. OK. All right. Uh The final technical skill skill number four is that you want to improve uh on your knowledge of the software development life cycle or the SDLC for short, right? This is really important. What is the SDLC uh creating software is a very messy and very complicated process. So, the tech industry has widely adopted the SCLC in order to give some structure to this very messy process. All tech companies and teams use variations of the SCLC in order to build, to design and to ship software products. So this is what you want to learn. You want to have familiarity with the end to end process of planning, developing and releasing software and you want to know the common tools and concepts that are used throughout this process. Here's a quick look at the six phases of the software development life cycle. Um We go from planning software, right? So all of my product managers, you guys play a really big role in the planning of software to the technical design. This is where uh developers, they take the requirements, they take the features that the product managers want them to build, they start thinking about the technical tradeoffs and they come up with a technical design, then they build it.

Once everyone agrees on the technical design, everyone agrees on the requirements we start building. Once we build it, we have to test, this is extremely important, we can't miss the step, we test it, then we figure out how to ship the software, which is another really big part in software development. Hundreds of books written on how do we actually ship software, right? And then documenting which really should be done throughout all six phases. But at the end of the software development, like um software development life cycle. It's very important that we have our documentation um up and, and good. Each of these phases involve many tools and processes and is essential to building software. And it's important for you as someone who is technical to learn about these six phases, uh being familiar with the tools and the concepts you use throughout the SCLC will give you a more intimate understanding of what goes into building software and not only that, but also what could go wrong throughout the process and what to do when it happens and how long each phase takes, which gives you an idea of how long it takes to build software, right?

So the SCLC is really important um uh product managers that I've um help uh train. They, they love the chapter on SCLC. They always say when they learned about what actually goes into software, they, they're better able to understand um time, you know, where, where a lot of the time is coming from that they are spending on building software, a lot of things that they didn't realize. Um So it's not just the requirement, it's not just the feature, it's a lot of technical backend stuff as well. So here's a quick recap of the four technical skills that you want to focus on developing broad awareness of available technologies, understanding technical tradeoffs, your ability to communicate technically and understanding the process of building software with SDLC as you grow.

And as you move in your career, you want to take an active approach to improving in these areas instead of focusing on learning how to code. Uh And I'm gonna share some tips with you on how to do that coming up. Um So here it is. Uh here are the three practical tips for improving your technical skills and knowledge. The first one is to focus on bread before death across core software topics. And I'm gonna explain what I mean by this and I'm gonna provide you some software topics to learn. The second um is to get yourself a tech mentor. I love this tip. I was a tech mentor. That's how I got started. Um I'm going to talk more about this and then lastly is to work on tutorials from cloud computing companies instead of taking a coding class and I'll tell you why this is much more effective. Uh So tip number one, focus on breath before death. As you embark on your journey, you want to uh become more technical. So you want to focus on breath before death. Uh Focusing on breath before death means learning the fundamentals across core topics in software before diving deep into any of them. So here are some examples.

Instead of learning the specific steps for setting up a database focus first on learning what is a database, what are the different types of databases and what are the pros and the cons of each of them. Uh Here's another example, focus um um instead of learning how to code in any specific programming language, focus first on learning what are programming languages, what are the different types of um programming languages um that are used on the front end and languages used on the back end and what these different languages are capable of.

Right? You don't have to go too deep into the differences in programming languages. It gets really convoluted and not very um it's not going to be very helpful for your role as a non engineering um uh person, but you want to be able to know the basics, right? The fundamentals here are some topics that you want to focus on instead of learning how to code. These are the core topics in software. The first one is the client side and the server side which are technical terminologies for the front end and the back end you want to learn about API S. This is really important because backend developers, they just spend all their time on API S. So understand what are API S and learn about the different components of an API. This is very important the components of an API learn broadly about programming languages. As I mentioned, also learn about how the computer actually turns program languages into a functioning application.

So here's my hint, read up on compiling compilation. What is that uh learn about cloud computing and what it means to scale. So I want you to touch on virtualization and, and uh um technologies OK. Virtualization technologies. Uh uh Learn about architecture and software diagrams.

This is so important uh learn about microservices and monoliths. These are the most popular architectural styles. Uh Usually when you are in a meeting with engineers and they're figuring out they're talking about different ways of building, they're talking about architecture.

They're never going to talk about how do I write a four loop in javascript, right? But they're going to talk about architecture. How do we architect this? How long is it gonna take? Forget uh Of course, you want to talk about data, you want to learn about data. Uh learn about the most prevalent data structures. JSON strings, booleans, arrays objects. What are those? Learn about SQL and no SQL databases? And what is a database schema? What is involved in database schema, right? Uh Learning um about that will also help you learn how to write SQL database schemas will help you learn about SQL. The SCLC is extremely important as we talked about previously. Also learn about deployments A K A shipping software. What is continuous integration, right? Learn about those, these topics broadly will cover most of what you need to know as a non engineering professional in software and technology, right? All right. Tip number two is to get yourself a tech mentor, tech mentorship is different from um what most people think about mentorship because tech mentorship is cross functional mentorship and it is extremely effective if you're in a role that works with cross functional teams. So I'm really talking about the product managers here. A tech mentor is a person with technical skills and knowledge. And usually that's a developer uh that you have regular meetings with.

All right, in order to learn about technical topics and concepts through discussion, learn about a specific product or app that is being built. So for example, if your product manager, you work on an app with a DEV team, you not only want to learn about technology broadly, but you want to be able to learn about your specific product and how it's built, right? And uh generally, the the tech mentor should be a resource for you as you're learning to become more technical, right? If you work on a product that has an engineering team, I highly suggest finding one or more tech mentors on that engineering team. Uh Since they'll be able to teach you about your product specifically, it's so great to have a tech mentor. Because a lot of times I know that uh people who are not technical, who work with, with a team, feel afraid to ask questions during engineering meetings. So when you have a tech mentor, you're building a relationship with someone specifically and you can ask all the questions that you might be afraid to ask in a large group of people. Here are some tips for tech mentoring receptions, uh sessions first meet regularly. When you first start out, I suggest uh once every two weeks to start out, once you feel more confident in your skills, you can always decrease it to monthly or bi monthly, whatever works for you and also on an as needed basis.

So, uh for example, um you might want to meet after or before an engineering meeting or if you're a product or project manager, you can ask for meetings during the phase where you are writing business requirements, right? Uh I um I also highly suggest coming prepared to each meeting with a technical resource as a way to facilitate discussion. This is really important because sometimes when you start a discussion, you don't know where to start a great way is to bring a technical resource. So for example, uh finding software diagrams asking a dev if they have software diagrams or API documentation or general tech docs or maybe you were doing your own research and you found these articles online. Um or there's this new service um that the team is using and you're reading up on it like the dog or something, right? Um You want to bring that resource as a way to start talking about different topics. Um Also uh the last step, this is also really important, please ask open ended questions. This is a great way to improve skill. Number two, in understanding technical tradeoffs. So asking questions uh like um what are some alternative options for building the same feature? Why were certain decisions made? If you ask a developer, if you could rebuild this feature or rebuild this product, what would you do differently? Those are open ended questions.

And then based on what they um explain and what they say, that's how you kind of learn, what are the technical tradeoffs? The, the things are going through that's mind and why they make certain decisions. Uh I wrote a Twitter thread about this um about, you know, different architectural decision and asking um uh adv about this thing. So I highly suggest you check it out. Um I also post a lot of other content about product management, uh tech skills and knowledge and working with DEV team. So please follow me on Twitter if you have an account. Uh Gabe is going to put up the link to this specific thread. And from there you can follow me on Twitter. All right. Uh Let's move on to the last tip for improving your technical literacy. Uh Instead of taking a coding class work on tutorials offered by cloud computing companies. Cloud computing companies offer lots of really great beginner level tutorials and some more advanced tutorials. But you want to probably start, you know, um small uh to get hands on exposure to many of the areas that we covered in. The first step. These tutorials are meant to be supplementary resource on your technical literacy journey. OK, so you'll still have to learn to read up on and learn about the technologies and each tutorial before working on them. Otherwise you're probably going to be very confused.

But these tutorials are a really great way to visualize technical con um concepts while getting exposure to a wide range of tools and services. Uh I do have a list of recommended tutorials uh from different cloud computing companies on the front end, the back end, there's one on the front end, the back end the infrastructure and databases to start out with. So feel free to check them out at skip level.co slash resources. Uh There's also a lot of other technical resources on the website. Uh There are PDF infographics on uh eight must know terms and three must learn tools um on the resources web page. You will also um uh get uh my episode on various podcasts where I talk about technology, skills and knowledge and product management um and technology. So make sure to check out the website. Um And again, Gabe is going to drop that link in the chat. All right. Uh Before I jump into the final thoughts and takeaways, please let me know what is your biggest takeaway so far? What have you learned the most that has helped you, Gabe is going to drop the topics that we've covered so far in the chat as a reminder for everyone uh for what we've covered so far. So please let me know what has helped you the most.

I also write regular content at least once a month about topics like how to work with DEV teams and technical topics like web three. So if you have a medium account, please feel free to follow me at imir you.medium.com. Again, Gabe is gonna drop that link in the chat for everyone. All right. Uh Here's the final thoughts and takeaways from today's session. If you have taken away anything first and foremost, with a little bit of time and effort. Technical literacy is a skill that everyone and anyone can improve in and develop. Even if you're not a developer, being tech, uh being more technical will only benefit you in your career, right? It's never gonna be a con for you. So make an intentional effort to keep your eyes and your ears open to opportunity to improve your tech literacy. Uh Second, remember that your goal is not to remember every technical details. I cannot stress this enough. It is that is not your goal to remember every little detail that is not possible. Developers don't even do that. It is to get to a place where you feel confident in your ability to learn about technology and software to acquire technology and software and to ask well informed questions.

If right now you feel like you're not able to know what questions, what follow up questions to ask you want to get to a place where you do feel confident in that technology moves so quickly all the time. Uh There's really no way that you're ever going to remember every uh every little thing or learn every tool. So your goal is to have enough context to be able to ask the right questions to then figure things out for yourself. In other words, when we look at the five levels of technical depth, what you want to aim for is number three and four now. So, so um if you're at level one where you have no idea what anyone's talking about or two, you broadly kind of understand, I want you to work to get to number three and four. At the very least, you should broadly understand what's being said, why it is important. And I would even say what is the problem that this, this thing solves and the implications for your product? Right? Again, super important for product managers. You don't need to be at number five.

I don't want you to aim for number five. This is really where the, the, the devs are, the programmers are. It's really, you know, not uh not needed, but if you, if you get there one day. Fantastic. All right. Uh Thank you all so much for joining. Um That is the talk for today. If you want to recap of today's presentation, all of the links. Um and the skip level offer just visit skip level.co slash women tech. Uh The link will expire on July 1st. So make sure to visit that soon. If you want to reach out to me directly, you can also find me on social media or you can book a coaching call with me. Um At this link, uh Gabe is going to drop this link again in the chat. So please make sure to check it out. All right, it is time for Q and A. Um I'm gonna take a look here. Sorry, I haven't been looking at the chat. Um But let's see, let me take a look at the P first. OK. And uh let me take a look at the Q and A. Um So Lauren said, so would it be beneficial to take a either of a certificate, cloud practitioner or would that be too in depth? Um I don't know that that would be too in depth. I think that would be OK. Although likely they will go into a lot of details that developers will only need to know. So if you're a non engineer, it might get a little bit too deep.

Um If you are in a role where you work very closely with, with cloud technologies, then I would say do it take it that might not be too in depth because your role is specific to, to cloud. So you do want to do that. Um Gargi said, how do you find a tech mentor if you haven't broken into the field that is um a really good question. Um So if you know anyone who is a software engineer, um I would reach out to them. Um Here's the thing about software engineers, they love talking about technology, they love, love, talking about technology. Um They, you know, software engineers love talking about, about building and what they're working on. So even if you were to reach out to a few people on linkedin, um that maybe you work at a company that you're interested in seem really nice. Um You can totally reach out to them on linkedin and let them know uh where you are in your career where you're hoping to get to thank them for their time and say I'm looking for a tech mentor. This is what it is. Um Would you be open to maybe just doing a couple of sessions with me for me to learn more about technology? Uh Jill, what are some of the best and most effective ways you found to stay up to speed on immersion tech technologies?

Yeah, this is um a really good question. I have done a lot of my own research into um resources for non engineering professionals and technologies. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any good resources. There are specific newsletters with specific technology. So for example, javascript Weekly, I know is a newsletter that sends out every, every week about new technologies in javascript, I do think, but it's a little bit too in in depth. I don't know if that's helpful. You can always sign up for it and check it out. I do uh do my best with keeping up with new technologies. Uh For example, II, I bought a section on like web three. I probably will write one on NFT and so you can always join my mine and that you can do at skip.co join my newsletter there. OK. Let's take a look at the chat. Uh Please let me know if you have more questions. You can just drop it into the Q and A and I can answer that for you. How are we doing on time? OK. It looks like we just have three minutes left. So um Mercedes uh said I work a lot with servers and API S. Oh This thing jumped now, I lost my place. Uh Yeah, I work a lot with servers and API S but do not have a deep understanding of them. I have some more learning to do. Yeah. Awesome Mercedes. That is so great.

I definitely um with API S again, learn about the components with a get request, post request, the request body, the the the the um request body. Uh Yes, just different parts of it. Servers learn about different types of servers. Um containers are very important as well if you uh so the the coaching link that gave drop. So Maria, if you just go to skip level.co scroll all the way to the end, you'll find a section where you can book a coaching call with me. So, Skip level.co Revathi. Oh, I'm so glad that you enjoyed this session. That's awesome. I hope you got a lot from it. G said, what about the program management field? I assume the same advice. Yeah. Uh product project and program managers. It, those, those three terms um depending on the company kind of varies so much. But they're also similar because they work so closely with developers. If you're a project or a program manager, you might have to go even deeper than the product manager. But again, it really depends on the uh company, but overall it's gonna be the same advice, Janine. I'm so glad this was beneficial for you. That's awesome. Natasha. I am a current graduate student pursuing it. What are good technical skills to be a great project manager? I love the community insights on this. OK. Um Hopefully my talk was able to give you some um thoughts on that. So the four technical skills learned throughout the, the core topics that I covered cloud computing, api S et cetera.

Can you please repeat how long the special offer will be? Yeah, it's gonna expire on uh 71, July 1st Eva uh Lauren. Yeah, that's so strange. I'm so sorry. I didn't realize that cap uh cap actually matters but um yeah, so skip over.co slash woman tech all lowercase uh Gabe. Can you make sure to just drop that and let everyone know everything is lowercase uh Elaine as an engineer, but in a non development role, I love the other view of tech that was covering this talk. It's not about the details but working knowledge. A lots of engineers that um do focus on one of those things could have today. Awesome Elaine, so glad. Um So, so glad that was helpful, Jackie capitalization. Yeah, so sorry Mani. So glad that was great for you. Thank you for dropping that link. Uh product management versus pro project manage management. I know that's a big thing. Uh representing PM task rebuilding and technical literacy about team John. That is awesome. That's a really big thing. We also help teams and companies become more tech learn technology. So feel free to go to skip level.co and reach out to me if you're interested. Um There's also skip level.co slash teams just for teams and companies. So we would love to see you there. Uh Maria Director of customer success. This one brilliant. Thank you so much.

So glad that was helpful, Gargi Yep, definitely explain technical concepts in simple terms. This I would say is something very important to find in a tech mentor, someone who uh communicates very well and is able to get out of their developer mindset to understand that, you know, not everyone is in that mindset all the time. Uh guard GM for ability to com. There's a key interview question. Yes, I had a technical interview for a company. Yeah, a lot of companies now for product management and different roles are asking more technical knowledge questions. So definitely that helps during interviews.

Uh This is from Jackie with technical abilities. That's a different skill. Understanding what a program does. What's the purpose and goals can I understand what it should do and what is the right? L lot more. Yep. There's a lot more business knowledge and more soft skills required for second. So, absolutely, Mani Google and Microsoft physically ask if you have a development background. I just gave an interview with both awesome uh Tracy. Yeah. Check out what Tracy has. She has free learning resources in her posts. That is awesome. OK. Thank you so much. Everyone for joining me again. Please feel free to reach out to me on social media, linkedin. Um Is I am Irene Yu Twitter, same thing I Ami Reneyu. You can always reach me on the web on the website at the skip level website. You can find a coaching call with me. Definitely reach out. Thank you everyone so much for joining me. Bye everyone.