In today’s competitive tech space, you need reliable and experienced management to guide your development and deployment strategies. Project management and product management are very crucial but distinct positions that are often confused by all levels of business leaders. A report by the Project Management Institute states that only 58 per cent of organizations fully understand the value of project management. Such underestimation is a reflection that not many companies clearly separate the roles of each one.
Here, we discuss the areas of responsibilities of both managers, why it’s a bad practice to combine these roles in one person, and whether you should ever completely substitute one for the other. This is to help you tackle the confusion and ultimately guide you to pick the right manager depending on the stage of your processes.
Product manager vs project manager — The differences
To effectively state their differences, let’s start with defining the term product and project:
A product is anything in the form of the object, software, or service that can be offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer.
A project is a temporary but progressive endeavour made to produce some kind of tangible or intangible result.
Product managers are the drivers of product development. They come up with initiatives and map out strategic decisions about what kind of product gets built. It is not uncommon to refer to them as the CEO of the product line as their major responsibilities are to focus on business objectives, measurable goals, and positive outcomes.
Project managers, on the other hand, oversee already approved and developed plans. Their responsibilities include managing schedules and resources by breaking down strategic plans into actionable, task-orientated initiatives.
Product manager vs project manager — key responsibilities
Here are the personality traits and professional skills that help each of them manage in the most efficient way.
Their shared skills:
- Problem-solving: To be a manager of any sort, the ability to solve problems is a prerequisite. This is closely related to the ability to manage risk as well. For any type of management role, it is important that you look for good risk managers and problem solvers.
- Communication skill: An effective manager is fundamentally an effective communicator. This is a skill need at all stages of the development process. Both product and project managers serve as spokespersons expressing the opinion of their departments.
- Negotiation: This might be closely related to communication skills but differ in that negotiation ability conveys the message to the other party and then finds a compromise that promotes fruitful cooperation which consequently accelerates the product success.
Skills of a product manager:
- Visualization and strategic planning: The ability to capture the full picture of the future product is a product manager’s must-have skill. Alongside seeing the big picture is making strategic plans for product development.
- Strong analytical skills: A product manager should be able to interpret all the necessary data and line them up for a clear sequence of action.
- Marketing knowledge: Understanding market trends and user needs is an important skill to succeed as a product manager.
- Effective evaluation: The ability to evaluate product success, user acceptance, and user satisfaction level is crucial.
Skills of a project manager:
- Scheduling: A project manager should be able to take an initiative and break them into actionable tasks and milestones with an underlying process for tracking progress and measuring success.
- Budgeting: An effective project manager should have a solid budgeting skill that will get the project properly funded and not allow the funds to overflow cost baseline.
- Leadership: A project manager plays the role of a link between the engineering team and stakeholders. This means that they are expected to balance the interest of both parties and effectively lead the team to success.
- Tech knowledge: To efficiently set technical milestones and allocate technical resources, a project manager should have a good grasp of the technical landscape.
Should you substitute one role for the other?
Substituting one role with another is not a good practice especially when your business has a defined hierarchy. This is because the manager may focus more on the responsibility of one of the roles while the other suffers.
However, You can combine the two scopes of management if your company the prospective product you are working on is small. Also, if you run a startup and the areas of responsibilities are rather limited, you can consider merging the two scopes.
Final thoughts, avoid spreading your efforts on too many tasks at a time. If you do, none will eventually be successfully completed. To make a project happen, be more targeted and precise in the steps you take.
