Episode 252: Understanding Product vs Project Management
In this episode, Melissa Perri dives into the often-confused realms of product management and project management. Many people conflate these roles, but they serve distinct purposes and bring different values to an organization. Melissa unpacks the unique responsibilities and skills required for each role and discusses how they can effectively complement each other to drive product success.
Whether you're a seasoned product leader or new to the field, this conversation will provide clarity and actionable insights on how to align these functions within your teams.
If you're eager to distinguish between product and project management, and to learn how these roles can work in harmony to propel your product initiatives forward, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to hear Melissa's expert advice and start applying these insights to your own product strategies today.
You’ll hear us talk about:
01:19 - Differentiating Product and Project Management
Melissa clarifies the core differences between product and project management, emphasizing the importance of focusing on value creation and timelines.
02:43 - The Role of Agile in Product Development
A discussion on how Agile practices have transformed traditional project management roles and why product managers often take on project tasks in smaller teams.
04:04 - Leveraging Roles for Product Success
Insights into how larger organizations can benefit from dedicated project managers and the value they add in coordinating across multiple products and teams.
Other Resources:
Follow/Subscribe Now:
Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:00:37] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. It's Friday and that means it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is the part of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. Today we're talking all about product management versus project management. Let's dive in.
PMs make great investors. If you're a product leader, curious about angel investing, check out Angel Squad. It's where over 2000 operators from Google, Meta and Apple learn to invest in high growth startups alongside Hustle Fund. I've been a member for years and highly recommend it. They've given me a few 30 day guest passes to share
so head over to go.angelsquad.co/melissa and make sure to act fast as the passes are limited.
Dear Melissa, could you elaborate on the contiguous battle for supremacy between product management and project management? I love this. Um, so product management versus project management. Uh, this is. You know, one of those things that we have been debating forever, where a lot of people misunderstand product management, think it's project management, because that's more widely known, for those of you listening to my podcast, you probably all know there is something different. It's not a battle though. These are complimentary disciplines. They're not really competing ones. So let's talk about what the core distinction is. Product management is really in charge of the why, what to build, why it matters. We're trying to figure out what's the problem we're actually solving here? How are we gonna solve it with the best solution? It's the why and it's the value creation part of it.
Project management is more about the when it's about coordinating resources, timelines, and making sure that it actually gets done. Now when we talk about project management. A lot of the backlash that comes from project management is really due to Agile. So what happened in pre Agile times was that typically there would be a project manager on the team steering the developers into, you know, when are we gonna get this done? What are the resources we need? And kind of, on top of them about how we're gonna get this done and pushing them for those dates. So when Agile came around, it was more about how can the team's project manage themselves? See, the idea here was that we would remove the role of the project manager as it exists in a person, but that meant that the rest of the team really would be doing project management themselves.
So the idea was like, we don't need one other person to be doing that and telling us like, get this done by this date, and creating all the Gantt charts. What really happened though is that the product managers took on a lot of that project management responsibility. Now, developers definitely took on some of it Scrum Masters and Scrum took on a lot of it. And if you weren't doing Scrum, a lot of that project management responsibility fell onto the product managers. So the product managers are not really micromanaging the developers by any means, but they're working with the team to kind of understand the dates and the resourcing, and they're working with management to make that happen.
So project management became this like small little subset of being a great product manager, but it's not the only thing, right? When it comes to product management, there's a lot more that goes into it, rather than just coordinating for resources, like asking, you know, working on timelines with developers, road mapping, all of that stuff.
It's more about, you know, discovery work. How do we figure out what to build? How do we calculate the value? How do we set success metrics? So think of project management as just a little tiny piece of what product managers do. Now when we think about project management, though, we do need some kind of project management in organizations, and sometimes it works out really well where the product managers can fill in some of those gaps and work with the engineers to do it as well. A lot of times engineering leads will do some subset of project management.
But there are cases where it does make sense to have a dedicated project manager in an organization. And I have seen this work really well when it comes to large, complex initiatives that have multiple dependencies and they're cut across various areas in various products. So when we think about product management, usually we're organized in organizations by our product lines.
So let's think about if we have a platform product, we have multiple different products and features over different things, and we have to coordinate across many groups. A lot of product managers will do much of that coordination, but sometimes it really helps to have a project manager or a program manager that also is helping that get done.
Uh, those people usually come in, they're, they're helping to steer the group of all the product managers, they're making sure that things are happening on time, they're working with the product managers to coordinate their roadmaps. That helps a lot when it's super complex in that area. So usually you would find a dedicated project manager or program manager when it comes to much larger companies, very complex products or things that are cut across many different products. So that's good. So you would wanna use, um, program managers, project managers there, and I would definitely rely on them if you need that help.
So when we're thinking about making this work. Product managers own the roadmaps, they own the priority, they really understand the why behind things happening, right? They're making sure that they own the why they're owning those problems. Project managers really are coordinating resources.
They're looking at timelines. They're cutting across very large initiatives. They're going across many, many different stakeholders, but both of them are gonna collaborate on risk, on stakeholder communication and see that through if they are working together. And if you are in a smaller company, you will usually see product managers and engineering leads and UX designer leads taking on a lot of that project management there.
So this isn't a competition. We need both skill sets to be essential for the success of products. But in a lot of places it doesn't make sense to have an extra project manager, especially if the work is contained and if it's not very complex going across many things. But at the end of the day, what the debates are that we really get into is: is project management and product management the same thing? No. Different skill sets. Product managers tend to be great project management as well, but they cannot only be great project managers. They still need that why, they still need that discovery to be successful.
So I hope that answers your question. And again, if you're listening to this and you have a question for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what it is. Coming up on Wednesday, we'll have another amazing guest. So make sure that you like and subscribe to this podcast so that you never miss an episode. Also, leave us a review. We love to hear what's working, what you would like to improve. We're always looking out there for great feedback. We'll see you next time.