Sometimes I see discussions on technical vs non-technical founders and how non-technical founders find technical co-founders while planning a new product. But are there any non-technical founders in the digital world? By technical founders—do we mean the ones who can write or understand the code? This sounds funny to me.
Are designer founders not the technical founders? If they can design prototype and do market research to validate a product before hiring something for engineering, do we call them as non-technical founders? If you set up a CMS without writing any code, are you not doing technical work? Or, if you set up Hubspot and MailChimp as a product marketer founder, are you a non-technical founder?
For everyone who works in technology, or uses technology to do their work, they are doing technical work. Erin Schroeder asked a related question on Twitter whether our work in content design and strategy is technical work.
If we can understand how the code might understand and process our words, mockups, containers, and logic of information flow, it means that we enable code’s utility and usability and usefulness to the organization and to the customers. Our work is certainly technical when we work in content, design, sales, marketing, support, or in customer experience.
Technology is not in loops, technology is what makes a logic loop work and what makes the loop usable, scaleable, and meaningful for its audience. Our job in content strategy and content design is a technical job. So, if we work on our own product without writing code, we are technical founders.
