In today’s fast-paced business world, you need competent members of management to guide your business strategies and ensure business continuity and success.
Both PM roles are complementary, yet unique roles that are often misunderstood.
Project and Product
A project is a one-time piece of work that has a specific purpose and usually lasts a certain period of time.
A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a particular need or want.
Both require a team to be successful.
This serves a clear distinction between both activities, in essence, while project managers ensure a project is carried out successfully, product managers ensure the organizational planning, production, or marketing of a product in all stages of the product cycle.
Project Management and Product Management
Project Management is the planning, organizing, and managing the effort to accomplish a successful project. There are many software tools that make project management much more effective and efficient. It benefits the project manager to have an understanding of the basic planning processes of project management before proceeding to undertake the more detailed processes.
Planning is all about research, asking questions, making decisions, and solving problems.
Product Management is the role and function within an organization that is responsible for a product’s overall success. It deals with the product development, business justification, product launch, and marketing of a product at all stages of the product’s lifecycle.
Project Managers and Product Managers
A Project manager is responsible for the successful delivery of a project within the specified time frame and budget, with a clear beginning and end, following a roadmap. They manage the development of the project up until completion. They must balance time, cost, and quality.
Roles and responsibilities of a project manager include, but not restricted to:
⦁ Initiating: defining the main objectives of this project, its purpose, and scope
⦁ Planning: creating a plan focused on attaining the outlined goals
⦁ Executing: team members come together to complete the work identified
⦁ Monitoring and Controlling: the project manager monitors and manages work processes, and actually spans the entire duration of the project.
⦁ Closing: the manager strives to ensure all activities necessary to achieve the final result are completed.
A Product manager is responsible for product planning and marketing, managing the product throughout its lifecycle, gathering and prioritizing product and customer requirements, defining the product vision, and working closely with engineering to ensure winning products are rolled out. It is above all else a business function, focused on maximizing business value from a product.
Roles and responsibilities of a product manager include, but not restricted to:
⦁ Defining the product vision, strategy, and roadmap
⦁ Gathering, managing, and prioritizing market/customer requirements
⦁ Working closely with engineering, sales, marketing, and support to ensure business case and customer satisfaction goals are met.
⦁ Developing a business case for new products, improvements to existing products, and business ventures.
Both roles are ultimately important, and more or less, require the same set of soft skills; leadership, communication, scheduling, risk management, critical thinking, cost management, business development, and many more.
In conclusion, while both roles are akin to the success of a business or venture, the project manager’s role ends after the successful completion of a project, subsequently closes that chapter, and moves on to other projects, he/she is not responsible for long-term care of the project, that’s for the product manager who conceives the idea, develops it, eventually brings the product to market and works on ways to ensure the product gets better with time and technological evolvement.
Also, project management focuses internally to achieve the aims and objectives of the project, product management goes further and focuses externally on the customer and the overall and continued success of the project.
Before embarking on any task or project, it is imperative to have a plan A and backup plans B to as many alphabets as possible in the probability that plan A does not work out as envisioned. Whether due to human error or errors beyond our innate capacity to fix, it can be managed. Approach each task task as a manager and follow it through.
If you’re looking to get into product management to build products that scale, we offer an excellent 12-week Product Management course at Dufuna.
