TL;DR - you want to hire people who can adopt and who respect both sides (business, developers)
I work as devops and my boss always says that good operation/support people are hard to find. One can be a super hero in programming, but really bad at customer service or supporting production. Similarly some ops are very horrible at coding, but they are great system administrators.
With that, I have had product owners and product managers who are really excellent at managing team and able to cope the lack of technical skill by absorbing the technical knowledge from daily standup and eventually able to work with the team to prioritize technical challenge. For example this one product owner works in big data and he couldn't ssh without me showing him, but he could go over the pipelines just enough to make me feel embarrass. Of course, if you are on a project long enough you should know how things work in general.
On the contrary I have had really senior technical people leading teams and eventually got fired for their inability to lead.
I work as devops and my boss always says that good operation/support people are hard to find. One can be a super hero in programming, but really bad at customer service or supporting production. Similarly some ops are very horrible at coding, but they are great system administrators.
With that, I have had product owners and product managers who are really excellent at managing team and able to cope the lack of technical skill by absorbing the technical knowledge from daily standup and eventually able to work with the team to prioritize technical challenge. For example this one product owner works in big data and he couldn't ssh without me showing him, but he could go over the pipelines just enough to make me feel embarrass. Of course, if you are on a project long enough you should know how things work in general.
On the contrary I have had really senior technical people leading teams and eventually got fired for their inability to lead.