How to Excel in Tech Without Learning to Code

If you work at a startup, chances are you’re going to need to collaborate with developers. That work could be internal on internal tools, integrations, providing expertise, etc. or it could be external marketing to, selling to, and recruiting developers

Developers can be some of the most curious, thoughtful, and creative people to work with. But from afar, they can appear intimidating at best and downright scary at worst.

Understanding the basics of what code is, how it works, and what developers are doing every day will help break down that barrier and engender collaborative relationships.

Product: Without understanding how software engineers work and the basics of what code they’re writing you’ll be looking at a black box. Effectively prioritizing feature work, keeping tight timelines, and aligning stakeholders are all predicated on understanding the work your developers are doing.

Recruiting: Technical literacy can help recruiters more quickly identify strong candidates, speak intelligently about internal engineering organizations, and articulate what kinds of interesting engineering problems candidates will get to work on.

Marketing: Even if your product isn’t explicitly focused on developers, every startup eventually needs to build a developer program (see Slack and Twitter). Without technical literacy, marketers will be in the dark on how to effectively speak to and engage with this potentially lucrative audience.

Sales: Developers are notorious for disliking being sold to, so the process requires a specific approach. You need to understand typical developer workflows especially as they relate to the product you’re selling as well as what makes your company’s product compelling to this technical audience.

The better you understand the software your team relies on, the more proficient you’ll be in it. This already happens naturally: teams that are large enough will usually have one “power user” who seems to know the ins and outs of Salesforce, Lever, or whatever your team runs on. You want to be that person. 

Becoming a true power user requires hours of reading documentation, finding tutorials online, and engaging with the community around whichever tool you’re focused on.

The tools you use day-to-day integrate with other parts of your company’s stack. Lever job postings might be displayed on your marketing website with Lever acting as the CMS; Intercom might be pulling user-level data from your data warehouse.

Understanding them means the difference between something getting fixed immediately and something getting fixed in a couple of weeks.

The more technically literate you get, the more of these small opportunities you’ll find in between the cracks of your company’s toolchain — and the more impactful you’ll be.

Start by taking a look at your company and your role, and where you think being more technical could give you an edge. Earlier we identified a couple of areas:

• Understanding and working with developers
• Being an expert at your toolchain

If you’re a marketer, you’ll want to focus on cultivating an understanding of the developer persona, as well as diving into specific topics like email deliverability/how data moves between systems. Be specific about what you want to learn. A useful question to ask is: “Where have I lost out by not being technical?”

If you’re working in startups, you’re already surrounded by people who spend their entire days doing what you’re trying to learn a little bit about software.

In this arena, you’ll want to come prepared. Structured conversations with questions you’ve thought of in advance are a much better use of a developer’s time than aimless curiosity. Try focusing on the areas you’re weakest in, and do research in advance so you’re not putting the entire learning burden on someone else

There aren’t many places on the web with curated resources you can just read through so you’re going to need to be scrappy. The best content for explaining tech concepts sits in two places:

• YouTube. It has a lot of garbage, but it can be a goldmine for visual explanations of technical concepts. The most useful videos are not always the flashiest or best-produced ones.
• Company-specific blogs. These are harder to find, but generally, the best content for any individual concept comes from a company that makes money off said concept.

Understanding how programming works, what a language is, and basic patterns like packages and version control will help you across the board:

• You’ll have a concrete understanding of what developers actually do
• You’ll be able to write simple scripts and work with tools to automate your work
• You’ll get a first-person view of the tools developers use today (React, Redux, etc.)

Think about something cool you’d want to build or automate maybe a tip calculator or something to send emails and try focusing on learning what you need to build that specific thing

Once you’ve built your plan and started looking around the web for helpful content, you’ll likely come across some usual suspects in your particular field who are creating useful stuff. Follow them, A few examples:

• Benn Stancil’s Substack on data strategy and tools
• Corey Quinn’s newsletter about AWS (and his entertaining Twitter)
• Vicki Boykis’s newsletter about tech and tech culture
• My Technically newsletter on getting more technical

You might not understand everything you read, but diffusion is powerful and you’ll be surprised how quickly you improve.