Let’s riff on this a bit. I’m in a senior product role now, but most of my career was in engineering. Writing code is like writing prose to me. It’s just something else I can type to help me reason or communicate. https://twitter.com/garethr/status/1391326360472260608

I’m pretty sure I was a good programmer before I was a good writer. Technically I learnt to write at school, but I didn’t write enough or improve my writing until much later, mainly by working with awesome colleagues.

You could argue my job now is not to write code. But my job now is also not to write documents or spreadsheets or slides but you’d probably expect most product leaders to do some of that.

It’s similar I think to folks moving to engineering management. Get well away from the critical path. Don’t take the really fun stuff. Use to communicate not instruct. But being able to code, and been seen to do so, builds credibility with colleagues and in my case customers.

I wouldn’t generalise this though. All product managers don’t need to code. All engineering managers don’t need to code. But if you have a skill you can use to improve your work (whether writing code, improv, public speaking, copy editing, data visualisation, whatever) use it