If you don’t come from a development background, building a product can feel like learning a new language while running a marathon. Developers talk in terms of APIs, databases, and deployment pipelines, while you’re focused on customers, strategy, and revenue. It’s all too easy for your business goals to get lost in translation.

Here’s the truth though: You don’t need to know how to write code to be a great product leader. You do need to be able to communicate effectively with your developers, make informed decisions about what quality looks like, and be able to create a shared understanding with them of what success looks like.

This guide is about bridging the developer-founder gap. Not by trying to “outsmart” your developers, but by learning how to work alongside them more effectively. I’m going to cover:

• How to understand and discuss technical topics, without learning to code.
• Simple scripts and templates to make communication smoother (with references to more comprehensive examples).
• Some key questions that will help you steer your product without micromanaging.
• Lessons I’ve learned the hard way about working with development teams.

By the end, you’ll have some tools to help you collaborate more effectively, avoid some common pitfalls, and build a stronger relationship with your technical team. All without needing to be technical yourself.

Sound good? Let’s go!

Speaking Tech Without Writing Code

Having worked in the tech industry myself for a couple of decades now, it’s easy at this point to take what I know for granted. I’ve effectively been apprenticed by the teams I’ve worked on for all that time, after all, roaming from project to project, org to org, tech stack to tech stack. Reflecting back, I definitely feel some embarrassment about my early efforts, not really knowing what I was doing and worse, not yet knowing what I didn’t know. 

My ignorance mainly revolved around not knowing what was being talked about (not being familiar with much of the verbiage, terminology and acronyms, some of which were specific to the companies and domains I was working in), and consequently not knowing what I myself was talking about, because I didn’t yet have a solid grasp on what the words being used meant in context.

Nor did I have a mental model of how to string them together so I could successfully arrive at an understanding or agreement when speaking with developers. 

Oof! Said like that, it sounds like I had a major set of problems on my hands.

Maybe you’re sympathetic to the plight of my earlier self, or experiencing something similar? After all, as a non-technical founder, you’ll almost certainly finding yourself talking with developers about:

• Product requirements – You describe what you want, but the developer asks for technical details you don’t have. E.g., “Do you want this as a synchronous or asynchronous process?” (Uh… what?)
• Scalability – You know the app needs to handle more users, but the developer asks about load balancing, caching strategies, and database sharding. (Wait, aren’t those things the developers’ job to figure out?)
• Integrating with third-party tools – You assume adding Stripe or Twilio is plug-and-play, but the developer starts talking about API authentication, webhooks, and handling edge cases. (I thought APIs were supposed to make things easier?)

And likely many other topics besides… 

How can you discuss those things clearly and confidently, without understanding the underlying tech stack they’re using?

Strategies for Speaking Tech with Confidence

I’m not going to lie… Going from not knowing much, to knowing enough to hold your own in a technical discussion is no easy feat. But if you apply some of the ideas & strategies below, you can get there a lot faster than might otherwise be the case.

1. Build a Mental Model, Not Just a Vocabulary

The first mistake I made was thinking that learning tech terminology was enough. I’d memorise acronyms and concepts but still feel lost because I didn’t understand how they connected to each other. Instead of focusing on individual terms, try to develop a big-picture understanding of how software products are built:

• Frontend vs. Backend – The user interface (what people see) vs. the engine running behind the scenes.
• Databases – Where information is stored and retrieved.
• APIs – How different systems communicate with each other.
• Infrastructure – Where everything runs (cloud hosting, servers, deployment).

Once you have a high-level framework (a mental map) in place, it becomes much easier to figure out how to place new terminology when you encounter it. You can start to learn about these things by:

• Reading articles aimed at product managers.
• Watching and work through YouTube videos on how apps work. 
• Sitting in on developer discussions and piecing together connections over time.
• Developing your own knowledge base, using e.g. a mind-map or some other tool that works for you and that enables you to demonstrate meaningful connections between technology concepts. 

2. Use Analogies to Make Complex Topics Click

Tech can seem intimidating, but most technical concepts have real-world equivalents that make them easier to grasp:

• APIs → Like a waiter in a restaurant, taking your request (order) to the kitchen and bringing back what you asked for.
• Load balancing → Think of a highway—adding more lanes reduces congestion.
• Caching → Similar to bookmarking a frequently visited page instead of looking it up every time.
• I have lots more tech analogies… Read a full list of them in my resources area: Analogies for Common Technical Concepts

When you hear something unfamiliar, try reframing it into an analogy. It may help not only you, but also others who are struggling with the same thing. 

3. Ask Questions That Get to the Core of the Issue

Another mistake I made early on was trying to “sound smart” instead of seeking clarity. Developers don’t expect you to be an expert, but they appreciate thoughtful, high-level questions.

Some great questions to ask in technical discussions:

• “Can you walk me through how this actually works, in simple terms?”
• “What’s the simplest version of this feature we could launch first?”
• “What are the biggest risks we should be thinking about?”
• “If we doubled our users overnight, what would break first?”

Instead of pretending to understand, focus on getting to the core of the decision being made. The more conversations you have like this, the faster you’ll pick things up.

4. Learn to Read (or Write) Technical Documentation

You don’t need to write code, but learning how to skim and extract key insights from technical documentation is a game-changer. For example, when working with APIs:

• Look at what inputs and outputs are expected.
• Check for error handling—what happens when something goes wrong?
• See if there are real-world use cases or examples that make sense to you.

Keep in mind that it’s not about mastering the details – it’s about learning to spot the important bits. Where to start?

• Try reading or the API documentation for tools you use (e.g., Stripe, Jira, or Slack).
• Try testing out some of the APIs your developers are working on, and sharing your findings.
• Try writing some documentation for your APIs (and testing out use cases for them at the same time).

5. Play With No-Code Tools to Build Intuition

One of the fastest ways to understand how tech works is to tinker with no-code platforms like:

• Zapier / Make.com (to see how APIs connect different services).
• Webflow (to understand frontend vs. backend).
• Retool (to experiment with databases and internal tools).

Even basic exposure to these tools will drastically improve your ability to talk with developers, because you’ll start to grasp what’s easy vs. what’s actually hard.

6. Focus on Business Impact, Not the Tech Itself

At the end of the day, you don’t need to be fluent in developer-speak – you just need to align on business priorities. The best way to do that? Frame discussions in terms of outcomes, not features.

• Instead of: “Can we add a caching layer to this API?”
• Ask: “Our response times are slow—what’s the simplest way to speed them up?”
• Instead of: “Can we use Kubernetes for deployment?”
• Ask: “What’s the best way to ensure our infrastructure can scale when needed?”

By staying focused on business goals, you create space for developers to make smart technical choices – without needing to micromanage how they do it.

Fluent in Tech, Without Writing Code

At this point in my career, I don’t have to think about how to “speak tech” – it’s second nature. But it wasn’t always that way. Like any skill, it takes time, exposure, and deliberate practice.

Start with the big picture, focus on asking good questions, and build up your understanding gradually. Over time, the language of technology will become familiar, the technical discussions will make sense, and you’ll find yourself speaking developer fluently – without ever touching a line of code.