Product Manager (PM) vs. Project Manager (PjM) — What’s the Difference?
Product People
Interim Product/Program Management, Product Ops, and Transformation Acceleration
Product Manager (PM) and Project Manager (PjM) are terms that often leave people scratching their heads, due to both roles sharing the?same acronym?and sometimes having a degree of overlapping responsibilities in some companies.
Acquiring a comprehensive view of how PMs and PjMs interact is helpful for any hiring manager. We delve into these often-interwoven roles, detailing what each job entails so organizations can make informed decisions on building teams.
Product vs. Project
Product and Project are two essential concepts that work hand-in-hand when creating solutions in a business context.
A?Product?is an outcome created for a specific target user. It could be a physical product, a digital one, or a service offered.?A Product is never “finished,”?as it could potentially be improved and optimized endlessly.
A?Project?is a plan of action to reach an outcome with a clear and measurable result in mind. Once the result is achieved, the?Project is always “finished”.
As we can see, Product and Project are two different concepts, but they can't exist separately in the world of digital product development.
The Product represents the?strategic dimension, the?why?we want to realize something. It answers questions such as: “Which problem are you trying to solve?”, “What job is the user trying to perform with this?”, “What’s the user’s end goal?”, “What solution would delight our customer?”, “What would be the best technology to implement this solution?”.
A Project, on the other side, reflects the?tactical dimension?or the?how?we want to do something. The questions it answers are the following: “Which steps do we need to take to achieve the desired result?”, “How much time and resources do we need to employ to achieve the result on time?”, “Which competencies are needed for implementing this technology?”.
Defining Product Manager (PM) and Project Manager (PjM)
Based on the definition of Product and Project that we have described above, we can also separate the two roles as connected to the two dimensions: strategic and tactical.
A broad definition of the responsibilities of a Product Manager (PM) vs. a Project Manager (PjM) is:
The Product Manager leads the Product strategy and has the responsibility to guide the development of the Product, while the Project Manager is responsible to plan and supervise the execution of the plan.
It’s interesting to notice that neither the Product nor the Project Manager is actually responsible for the proper?execution.?In fact, as we will soon see, they both?facilitate?such execution rather than carrying it out.
Why Separate the Two Roles?
At this point, it’s legitimate to ask why strategic and tactical planning have separated. Wouldn’t it be better if the same person creating the plan also saw that it’s carried out?
For a long time, this has been the standard, also for digital products (and it still is, especially in small and medium companies).
As long as the Product was launched with the same granularity and frequency as the project, it wasn’t difficult for the Product Manager to fulfill the role of Project Manager.
In the world of Web Services, though, with the launch of different versions of the software happening in parallel also several times a day, this is more challenging and feasible.
For this reason, it became practical to separate the strategic responsibilities from the tactical ones and assign them to the Product Manager and the Project Manager.
Let’s see now which responsibilities belong to each role.
Responsibility of a Product Manager (PM) vs. A Project Manager (PjM)
Product Managers are often defined as the CEO of a Product.
Personally, I find the metaphor of the Product Managers as orchestra directors?much more fitting. Although they do not play any instruments, they perfectly understand what each player must do to get the melody the audience expects.
In the same way, Product Managers don’t carry out any tasks necessary for creating and launching a product (design, development, marketing, etc.) but know what each function needs to bring to get the final Product the customer expects.
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To stay with the metaphor of the orchestra, the Project Manager is the person that ensures the show is organized on time and within the budget. In the same way, Project Managers are responsible for defining and keeping deadlines while developing a Product and ensuring there are enough resources and the right competencies for completing the job and delivering the agreed result.
We can sum up the responsibilities of the Product Manager vs. Project Manager as follows:
Responsibility of a Product Manager
Responsibility of a Project Manager
Competence Areas of a Product Manager (PM) vs. a Project Manager (PjM)
As we have seen, the Product Manager and Project Manager are both responsible for the organization and facilitation of the job of other people, rather than executing it.
While the Product Manager takes care of organizing tasks that will feed into the strategy, the Project Manager is responsible for the tactics that will ensure proper execution.
We can define the different areas of competence as follows:
Competence Areas of a Product Manager
Competence Areas of a Project Manager
If you’d like to see a visual representation of that, check this?Venn Diagram.
Conclusions
Although there are some benefits in keeping the two roles separated, it’s not uncommon that the responsibilities and areas of competence of the two roles would overlap.
That’s almost always the case in start-ups and small or medium companies due to the lack of resources, the frequency of new releases, and the complexity of product interactions.
In bigger companies, also those more advanced from a technology point of view, there is still much confusion regarding whether the two roles and discussions should be separated or not.
Often they are both covered by one person, with either the title of the Product or Project Manager.
Even if the difference in the real world is not well defined, I hope this article will help bring more clarity at least from a conceptual point of view, on why it makes sense to distinguish between a product manager and a project manager.
I’d like to spark a conversation on how the two roles are seen and implemented in different companies. What is your experience? Share it in the comments!