Project Management vs Product Management

Introduction

In the fast-paced and evolving world of IT, the roles of project management and product management are often mentioned together. Both roles require strong leadership skills, effective communication, problem-solving abilities, and collaboration with cross-functional teams. However, they differ in their scope of responsibilities and areas of focus. While they may overlap, they serve distinct functions. This blog will explore the key understanding, differences, overlap areas, responsibilities, and how both roles contribute to the success of IT projects and products.

Let’s talk about both roles individually first and understand the basics of both roles.

What is product management?

Product management is the function of managing and owning the development and launch of a software product or technology solution and adding continuous improvement to it. The role of a product manager (PM) is to bridge the gap between business objectives, user needs, and technical development. Their goal is to define, design, and deliver a product that meets customer needs, is technically feasible, and aligns with the company’s business goals.

Product management is focused on the long-term vision and lifecycle of a product. The product manager is responsible for understanding end-customer needs, defining product features and objectives, aligning the product with organization objectives, creating strategy, and working to ensure that the product continues to deliver value over time, often spanning multiple projects.

Generally, a product manager’s responsibilities comprise the following:

In larger organizations, product managers can take on high-level work like managing a team. In smaller organizations, a product manager might do more hands-on work, such as market research or even some project management.  Also, more than one-third of Fortune 100 companies have a chief product officer (CPO), showing a 41% growth rate over the past few years

Product Management

What is project management?

Project Management is a function that involves the planning, execution, and management of IT-related projects, such as software development, network infrastructure, or systems integration. The goal is to deliver these projects on time, within scope, and on budget while meeting specified requirements. When a product manager designs and defines a product, managing the development and implementation of that product is called project management.

Project management revolves around managing temporary, time-bound objectives to achieve specific goals. In IT, a project manager is tasked with delivering an IT solution—such as a new application, website, or system—within a defined timeline, scope, and budget. This task can be product development as well, which is where these two roles interact.

Project managers are generally responsible for the following specific tasks:

Project Management

 Roles & Responsibilities

Roles and Responsibilities

Life Cycle

Project Life Cycle

• Initiating: This is where a project charter comes in to outline the business objective and sponsors of your project for approval.
• Planning: This is where you’ll develop a detailed project plan with timelines, resourcing, tasks, milestones, and deliverables that your entire team will follow.
• Execution: This is where you and your team will roll up your sleeves and start the development of project tasks decided in project planning.
• Monitoring & Controlling: You need to monitor project progress to ensure things stay on track. You should evaluate your project against the KPIs, such as cost/budget, scope, timelines, and quality standards you established in the planning stage.
• Closing: The closing stage is about wrapping up open ends. This includes evaluating the project, preparing a final project report, getting approvals from appropriate stakeholders, and collecting and saving necessary project documentation. It makes it easier to refer back to it when necessary.

Product Life Cycle

• Concept and design: The ideation phase, where a product’s requirements are defined based on factors including competitor analysis, gaps and trends in the market, or customer needs.
• Develop: The detailed design of the product will be created, along with any necessary tool designs. This phase includes validation and analysis of the planned product, as well as prototype development and piloting in the field. This generates vital feedback on how the product is used and what further refinements are needed.
• Production and launch: Feedback from the pilot is used to adjust the design and other components to produce a market-ready version. The production of the new product is scaled, followed by launch and distribution to the market.
• Service and support: Following the launch of the new product, the period of time when service and support is offered.
• Retirement: At the end of the product’s lifecycle, its withdrawal from the market must be managed, along with any retrials or absorption into new concept ideas.

If we see the life cycles carefully, it is valid to say that project management is a subset of the product management role in the context that everything that is worked upon in project management is part of product management as well because product management will be incomplete without products being developed and deployed. Now, the question is why we do have two different roles existing then. A simple answer to this is ‘expertise’ and more focus on respective roles, though you may easily come across organizations that expect product managers to take care of the development cycle as well, and then on the other side, there are organizations that want their product managers to focus only on usability, features, and market research, and they get onboard expert project managers for the development and deployment.

Key Differences

Project managers primarily interact with internal teams and stakeholders, including businesses, sponsors, developers, designers, and other departments, to ensure project execution. They focus on the internal delivery aspect.

Product managers interact with a broader group of stakeholders, including customers, sales, marketing, and even external partners. They focus on understanding market demands and customer feedback to improve the product.

Overlap

While the roles of project and product managers are distinct, there is often some overlap, especially in IT as given below:

Example

Let’s take an example of an app favorite to all of us. You guessed it right. Zomato. Let’s see the features that we come across while using the app. Do you recall that flashing sound when the order is confirmed or when our order status changes? If not, please make an order. Did you find the “Veg only” mode toggled on the front view right at direct and easy view ensuring and gaining trust?

And the recent addition of group orders, where multiple customers can use the app on their own devices and create a common order. This is such a common need and was given out in any app. The features list can go on. The way you add to the cart. The way you navigate via different restaurants and menus, select items, quantity, etc.

Take a guess who comes up with the idea of such features, and flow? Who creates the user experience? Who defines these features and the flow? It’s the Product Manager.

Now take a guess on who works with the development team to get these features developed and implemented, manage and track daily progress, and make the features available on the app for the customers. It’s the Project Manager.

Conclusion

Product managers design and define what needs to be built, and project managers ensure it is built on time and within budget. Project managers may manage the execution of multiple projects that contribute to the evolution of a single product managed by the product manager. While the project manager focuses on the development cycle of the product, the product manager ensures the product is aligned with long-term business goals.