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> our Product Manager SQL interview

Your what now? (Well, unless you're a database company.)

In all my time as a PM I've never had to know, let alone prove competence in, my SQL knowledge.

In all my time as a PM, the vast majority of my "SQL" usage is crafting slightly more advanced filters and queries in Jira or similar.

There are analytics platforms, telemetry, metrics, you name it.

I've worked as a PM on fairly complex products (integrating and manipulating healthcare data, managed platforms atop Kubernetes, etc.) and never needed SQL knowledge.

As a general rule in terms of how I allocate my PMs and their efforts now? "PMs have far more valuable things to be doing than lovingly crafting handwritten SQL for god-knows-what reasons."



If you have analytics, a PM being able to answer their own behavior/business questions by querying logs is really valuable.


Yes, I would love for my PM to do any analysis from our logs.


I know right? Sounds a bit crazy. But we are successful in hiring great PMs, so I can say it's working.

But it's super basic SQL. Select and joins, mostly.

Developers with several years of experience in their resume still fail it.




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