In this blog post we will break that myth by going over some high paying non-coding jobs in tech. We will also talk about some qualifications and backgrounds required for each of these and three my tips on how to break into that role. As someone working in the tech space with no coding background and earning 6 figures and helping my clients do the same, I'm quite excited about this one so grab yourself a notebook or journal and let's dive in.

Product Manager

First with every project we need someone to own the vision to understand what our clients dream product is, like a house and to make high impact decisions throughout the project. In the world of property development you might call this person the lead architect. Similarly in the world of tech if we wanted to for example build a banking app we would need the services of a product manager to help us shape the vision of the app. Build out a list of value adding features also known as a roadmap, assist with the positioning of the app on the market and finally acts on our behalf as the main stakeholder of the project.

The vast majority of product managers i have worked with in my career don't have any programming background and actually they tend to come from either a research or even business and design backgrounds. Because this is a role that is truly in the intersection of business engineering and design in my opinion this is best suited for someone who's a natural born problem solver is creative and has a good eye for design and a business acumen and what i mean by having a business acumen is that you have to be able to prioritize and make decisions that work for the business you work for and most often than not these decisions will have a dollar value assigned to it. If this is something that you're looking to explore get yourself a scrum product owner or agile product manager certificate and while it's not mandatory to be certified it will definitely help with the job hunt. I would also recommend reading a book called inspired.

So now that we have a product manager to own the vision of the new banking app we need someone to help us stay on top of three things, The Time, Cost and the Deliverables or in other words, how long will everything from planning to design to coding to launch, also what will it cost us both for my materials so cost of goods and cost of the team on the ground. In the context of building a property you need concrete wood, cement, steel, bricks from a pure material perspective but also you need people on the ground like builders, electric engineers, painters, interior designers and so on, but also we need to stay on top of the agreed deliverables and manage any risks that derail us from delivering these.

Project Management

Just like in the world of property development in software and tech every team is likely to need a project manager or also sometimes referred to as a delivery manager in some companies to be accountable and oversee the time cost and deliverables of the project. The project manager also helps the team to stay on track of the agreed budget, plan major milestones, manage things like expenses,manage third party supplier relations and most importantly set the team up for success from a project management process perspective. This role would suit someone who's a great communicator, good with people's timelines, and budgets but also someone who's naturally, organized. So if you've been complimented for your digital savviness your ability to work well with people and staying organized maybe you should look into becoming a project manager. To get started i would try to get certified in a agile project management certificate, Lean Six Sigma Green or Black Belt so in order to make data-driven or data-informed decisions. When it comes to building this new banking app with all its new features and the roadmap, we should be relying on the services of a researcher.

UX Researchers

A researcher helps the product manager and the team with data to prevent making subjective, non-value adding decisions like, designing and building features that no one wants or that no one is going to use and in order to stay as objective as possible UX researchers collect both

quantitative and qualitative data and they feed that back to the product manager and the team in order to help inform their strategy. So for qualitative research they might be doing activities like competitive research conducting, one-to-one, user interviews, focus groups and so on. For quantitative research which is equally as insightful if our banking app is already on the market and has been used. As a researcher you'd be looking at user data to determine where users are dropping off how easy, are they finding the navigation and also to use the data to uncover usability issues anywhere within the banking app This is best suited for if you generally enjoy doing research, human psychology uncovering insights and you have a analytical mind. If this is up your street I would recommend you to pick up a book called UX research practical techniques for better products.

UX Designer

If you need to teach people how to use your product or app then you've already over complicated it. The best product, like the iPhone, apps and websites are the ones that are easy and intuitive to use and this is where a ux designer becomes useful. A ux designer is accountable to ensure that what we design and build is useful, usable and valuable. The importance of a great user experience also extends to products and tools.

We use it in our daily lives. For example while a luxury car's dashboard looks beautiful you might argue using it on a daily basis is not really the most practical and user friendly. As a driver you want to keep your eyes on the road instead of fiddling with touch screens just to change a song or the radio channel.  

In large organizations ux designers don't design the actual final interfaces instead, ux designers produce things like storyboards, customer journey maps wireframes, sitemaps

which are all useful activities and tools to help visualize the user's actions and environment in order to design for their problems and needs in a way that is intuitive.

So now that the ux designer has carefully laid out the experience of the new future in detail, it's now time to build beautiful and usable looking visuals, mockups and interactions in a world of property development. This would be the role of an interior designer. One of the biggest misconceptions of a ui designer is confusing it with a graphic designer and just because someone is really great at photoshop and is able to design stunning logos and banners. An ios or android app take a complete different skill set on one hand you're designing a banner or logo that's meant to be just looked at with zero interactions and on one hand you design an app that's designed for a thumb that is meant to be allowing people to use a complex user flow of course it helps if you have a background in graphic design. One of the best ways to break into industry as a ui designer is to learn tools like figma or sketch and start designing apps and websites in public and share your work with the outside world and keep an eye out on junior ui designer positions.

A business Analyst

Business analysis is one of the key roles in tech as they help the team in two ways, one they work with the designers and translate all the agreed user experience flows diagrams and user interfaces into a set of very clear requirements that the coders can pick up and implement when it comes to complex software development. it's incredibly important to communicate clearly and to ensure seamless handovers between the design phase and the coding phase. to illustrate how business analysts work with designers and coders let me give you the following example. 

• If you were to ask me to make you a cup of coffee with a bit of milk and two spoons of sugar and two minutes later I would come back with a cup of tea with a bit of milk and two spoons of sugar. After you taste it and you go well this wasn't actually what you had in mind, 

  • first you wanted the milk to be skimmed milk, 

  • second you wanted the coffee in a takeaway cup, 

  • third you wanted brown sugar instead of white and 

  • Finally i should have used starbucks coffee bags instead of non branded ones

Now of course software development is far more complex than making a cup of tea hence why business analysts are so important in building great products. The second way business analysts help the team is that in some scenarios there might be problems that we can't solve in our own in-our engineering team and we need to look elsewhere like for

example third-party. Tools a business analyst can help us with those problems too. The role of a business analyst would ideally suit someone who's quite digitally savvy and has an IT background without knowing anything about coding. again most peers i know don't know how to code but you should familiarize yourself with some business analyst best practices and a great resource for this is a free platform called business analyst experts.com.

All right so now that we have the product manager who has strategically prioritized the next few features of the banking app based on data that was supplied by the ux researcher, a great design that was translated into a set of clear requirements by a business analyst that then went on to be coded by the programmers. We're now one step away from launch but before we can launch we need to test if everything works as expected but also to stress test the system on how it would cope under extreme circumstances and see if things are breaking.

To do that we can employ the skills of a quality assurance engineer, who is someone that tests the app on different platforms, devices screen sizes, browsers and so on. They give the product manager and the team the green light to launch the next version of the app. So if you're the type of person to be noticing small mistakes and issues when you're browsing the internet and using your favorite apps maybe you should look into becoming a quality assurance tester. I would start off by trying to become certified as a software quality assurance tester. I hope this was useful