What is the difference between a B2B product manager and B2B project manager: responsibilities and expectations
Always exists mystery in B2B product managers and project managers. Regarding the B2B part, there are many different methodologies, toolkits, and mindsets from both.
Let’s crack the role easily via the product and project life cycle.
Introduction
Before digging into the sharing, do we really know what the B2B stuff is? Come on. We all know that is a Business-to-Business transaction model. It is essential part to know it first.
At first glance, we offer the service to “business clients” instead of “individual customers.” If your business scale of “each client” is very small, it is closer than the “each client,” so-called B2C. The scale might be the numbers of business income and people cooperation. For example, in your business model, your service is to offline shopping stores for digital transformation, and you want to build a commercial website, payment service, etc. You need a lot of stores to support your business.
Somehow, it may not be the responsibility of a PM. Absolutely, if we want to be a better “B2B PM”, we need to know more about the business model and market trends.
Roles & Responsibility
Overall in B2B life cycle, it involves several stages — Requirement gathering, Value proposition, Contract & Legal, Solution delivery, Client cooperation and negotiation, etc. Let’s take a look one by one.
1. Discovery Phase —Business Needs, Product & Feature Roadmap, Contracts Sing-off
1a. Business Needs
- Product Manager: We focus on the company goal, which needs to be fulfilled, not only a specific client. Find out the market trends, and know their pain points so the company can solve their problems. It always comes to standardization with scale-up. You can imagine it’s not an efficient way to build a product repeatedly if a new client comes.
- Project Manager: We focus on one or two client needs that it mores more customization sometimes. Also, we need to narrow down their business needs which the company can deliver easily and quickly, and provide feedback to product managers on what kinds of needs might be a trend.
1b. Product & Feature Roadmap
- Product Manager: Although product managers focus on both, we also pay more effort into product backlogs. It needs lots of context-switch to zoom out between high-level strategies and zoom in on detail-level feasibility. Taking a 1–3 years roadmap into account is necessary for better product vision. In addition, we should also listen to what clients need per project; it must fail to build something behind closed doors without involving others.
- Project Manager: The project comes to a clear start and end time, and we might need to find out whether it has the iteration. In this case, we focus on the features roadmap per milestone. Also, we can give the concept of what we can improve in the future if we have more phases. On the other hand, the product of project delivery often results from a product roadmap; that is, both roles need to cooperate well to contribute the company's growth.
1c. Contracts Sing-off
- Product Manager: Most of the cases, we don’t need to get involved in it. It has better to know how many contributions from product to project. The reason is we must know the pricing model, which means profit and loss to have a deep understanding of the business model.
- Project Manager: Sometimes we must cooperate with sales closely. It has a significant impact on knowing whether the acceptance criteria are reasonable or not because we sometimes offer parts of customization and 3rd party cooperation for a specific client.
2. Delivery Phase — Design & Development, Release, Operation
2a. Design & Development
It has no doubt either a product manager or a project manager needs to focus on standard products or customized products. Cooperating with designers and developers is day-to-day life. Based on each culture and organization structure, it has more roles like product owner, and scrum master to own their responsibilities.
The main difference is a product manager should still focus more on business and market needs. Is it essential that the designer and developer use different ways to achieve the business goal? At least, product manager should know the pros and cons and leverage the go-to-market strategy.
2b. Release
- Product Manager: The different responsibility of a project manager is whether this release impact on product-based client or a project-based client. If it is a product-based client, the client has to follow the new release even when the specific user experience might not be suitable for them. Otherwise, we have to notify the project manager so that he/she should decide to follow the product release. The project always has a contract, so it might not be easy to do the spec change.
- Project Manager: It is very complicated when the release has different environments — dev-usage, pre-production, production, etc. A project manager, sometimes it is a release manager, has to decide when is the suitable time to release feature by feature for some purposes. Moreover, they need to do version control over different products or API integration if needed. We can leave this topic for sharing in the future.
2c. Operation
- Product Manager: So-called product iteration. We must consider which features should be eliminated or added to our roadmap.
- Project Manager: After the product is launched officially for a specific client, it always goes along with an operation contract for 1 to 3 years for example. We can not make sure a product is no bugs, no blur areas, and no improvement based on market trends. Therefore, regarding the issue notification per request, we need to think this is a project enhancement per quotation request or another independent phase contract.
Conclusion
It’s tough to cover all parts to compare the similarities and differences between both roles in one article. If you have other different insights or any more interests, please contact me. We believe we can share our experience on that. As time passed, I believe we always had more ideas and analyses on each topic.
About Author
Why Starts
I wrote many articles via Mandarine to illustrate my insights on product management, business strategy, career path, and book reviews. Now it’s a good try to reach various audiences across many countries. It’s very exciting to share insights and exchange ideas with different backgrounds.
Who Am I
This is Mr.T, with around 10-year experience in product and project management. Mainly in the B2B technology field, I have ever in the telecom, electronic vehicle, and video streaming industries.
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