Introduction

An interview with Irene Yu. Irene is a former software developer for up-and-coming everything store Amazon, where she found herself mentoring non-technical product managers to help them get better at tech. Inspired by her success, she left to found Skiplevel, a technical training startup aimed at teach actually useful tech skills to product managers & non tech founders.

We talk about a lot, including:

• The mission behind Skiplevel and how she's trying to provide a good and easy place to learn useful technical knowledge for non-engineering tech workers
• What being technical means, why being technical is helpful, and the importance of giving PMs and founders confidence to have constructive conversations with engineering
• The target audience for Skiplevel and whether it's suitable for the wider business or focused relentlessly on PMs and founders
• Why learning to code is not the best way to learn technical skills and how learning a broad set of technical concepts is superior
• The four pillars of technical knowledge that Skiplevel teaches and how they contribute to helping people go wide not deep
• Whether product managers even need to be technical, whether coding interviews are appropriate, and why companies use them
• The potential risks of people knowing enough to contribute but not enough to make decisions, but then trying to make them anyway

And much more!

If you want to get better at tech & go beyond learning how to code toy apps for the sake of it, why not check out Skiplevel.co?

You can reach out to Irene on Twitter.