I tend to use "conceptional skills" to describe someone's ability to understand a complex system. When hiring - especially for roles like "technical product manager", I could care less about "coding experience". CS education is a plus for sure, 1-2 years coding too. But beyond that, I feel the conceptual skills are far more relevant. How much modelling can someone do in their head? How quickly? How honed is that ability in them? Sounds like your university trained your conceptual skills, that's awesome. Other people train them through other means, consciously or not.

Hiring even developers with lots of experience but low conceptual skills has mostly been a disaster for me in the past. The same goes for "technical something" roles. Programming experience can be a bit of a red herring for those actually.

For the most part, my "technical" interviews go into conceptual skills and motivations. That's the stuff I really need to know to decide whether to hire someone. Some language/tool/framework, they can learn quickly, given conceptual skills, motivation and _some_ programming experience. (Disclaimer: I primarily hire generalists as FTEs. For specialist skills, I prefer to hire freelancers temporarily, where I focus on what exactly they can do today.)