So, am I a Product Manager or a Project Manager?

Written by Ivan Zamesin, CEO & Founder at The Product Gene

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

From time to time I receive this question in different contexts. “Which one is cooler? Who is in charge of what? Who should I (a business) hire — a product or a project manager? I heard that a product manager is cool to have, but we only have project managers. Does that mean we’re not cool enough?”

Simply googling “product manager definition” shows a pretty good article, which describes what a product manager must do: be in charge of the roadmap and vision*, communicate with stakeholders and manage a team of developers/analysts/designers horizontally. It also points out the difference between a Product Owner and Product Manager, Product Director, CPO and so on.

Considering that everything product managers do has at least one risk assumption (RAT), roadmaps are more and more often treated like a desire to work a particular way, not like a specific set of what we should be doing and what will definitely bring us profit. And the target-setting function expressed as “we’re doing this” in the shape of a roadmap migrates into OKRs as “raising a specific metric by x%” or (my personal favorite) “testing 50 hypotheses on how to raise a specific metric”.

I will now try to simplify the descriptions of product and project managers, and divide their functional and communicational areas of responsibility:

Product Manager

1. Proactively tries to determine where to put in the effort so that it results in the growth of revenue/ profit margin or looking for a metric that would get you as close to revenue / profit margin as possible. The focus is switched onto a) finding the right segment b) thinking of a new product/vertical/feature for this segment and testing it through MVP and RAT.
2. As a result of point 2, product manager chooses which metric to drive, setting up OKR on their own (and makes it either more or less ambitious after getting feedback from an executive)**
3. Communicates with stakeholders, filters and prioritizes the information and then gives feedback about their requests.
4. Horizontally manages processes and tasks for neighboring roles making the product — developers, designers, analysts, operational managers, etc.
5. Reaches the goals from point 2 using accessible (or previously inaccessible, which is more interesting) resources.

Project Manager

1. Horizontally manages processes and tasks for neighboring roles making the product — developers, designers, analysts, operational managers, etc.
2. Reaches goals set by the chief executive. Usually, in terms of “launching”, “making” or “gathering requirements and making” and using, in most cases, accessible resources.

A product manager is different from a project manager in two things

1. Being proactive
2. Having the skill and responsibility to decide a direction in which effort should be put

And the biggest issue of transferring a task from a product to a project manager is in the fact that while doing so, a ton of information is being lost.

When to divide product and project managers?

I think that the division needs to only be made when dealing with long release cycle projects with a large amount of connections. The proactive and ambitious will run away from such projects pretty quickly, while the “administrators” (according to Ichak K. Adizes) will gladly carry a hundred small touch ups to production for a year or longer.

For example, during 2014–2016 (I left the company after that and don’t know what it’s like now) this sort of division worked well in the development of Yandex Browser: because of a really long release cycle for new builds, thorough merge and testing and a big amount of connections within the system, new features took months to release.

That is why losing information when transferring tasks from a product to a project manager was compensated by the fact that this mechanism, overall, worked quite well. If product managers were the ones releasing the features, they would test far less hypotheses, would make even less features and would resign sooner, because there’s nothing a product manager likes more than improving things.

Okay, I run a business, so who’s better?

Who do I need — a product or a project manager?

Main points:

• Project managers cost far less
• A project manager is not a hot spot, ambitious people won’t apply for it
• All project managers, who want to be product managers, call themselves product managers
• Product managers often overestimate themselves when it comes to money.

After about a third of all the job interviews I conduct, at the end I have to give the following feedback: “in my opinion, your experience and skill correlate with a salary of *this much* which is 2–3–4–5 times less than the amount you’re asking for”. I have to add, that my goal here is to give an objective and helpful feedback and when looking for a suitable applicant I take into account interests of both parties, without trying to simply “knock down” the price.

- If you’re having this question, then your team is probably lacking expertise in product management and it will be hard for you to hire a product manager based on points above, meaning that finding one will be really hard

But!

A business should almost always be more interested in hiring a person whose goals will include proactively searching for metric’s growing points and profit, rather than just simply keeping the existing processes running. Even if a product manager is inexperienced and will look for ways to improve the established processes only 5–10% of the time, having the same project management skills they will still find better success than a person simply in charge of keeping up the quality of existing processes.

- There are actually quite few businesses with long release cycles (since it directly correlates with the complexity of the system and the company size) and those usually have and will continue to have a platform of business analysts and system analysts.

It’s almost always more profitable to hire product managers. If you’re low on money and there isn’t much responsibility involved — it’s better to hire a young product manager with project management skills and, after giving them more and more responsibility, happily watch them improve long-established processes, simply because they are proactively thinking about them and focus on testing hypotheses.

I want to become a project manager

What should I study — project or product management?

• Project managers earn much less than product managers
• If you have even a tiny bit of responsibility of proactive growth of a metric, you will have an opportunity to test hypotheses, make more mistakes, quickly gain more experience, get more and more responsibility and, as a result, become a valuable product manager.

But I feel more comfortable when my responsibilities are fixed. There’s an established process and I support it, occasionally improving it. What should I do?

It’s one out of two — either you are actually an “administrator” according to Ichak K. Adizes, and this is a perfect job for you, which is great. Then you can grow as a professional in the field by taking on more complicated projects. Or, you’re rather an “entrepreneur” (also acc. to Adizes) which means that you’re proactive, but have some mental barriers in the shape of fears, such as “I won’t be able to do it”, “maybe it’s not for me”, “I’m afraid to fail”, in which case you should a) identify these barriers and b) overcome them to become a product manager.

Summary

Product managers are more useful for almost all business tasks. Becoming a product manager is almost always more interesting. Having said that, a product manager should have the perfect project management skill, otherwise there won’t be the magical “getting shit done” and being proactive will turn into “he’s all talk and absolutely no action”.

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* I hate the term vision, because it’s used in phrases like “we want a product manager who will create a serious vision for our product” which usually translates to “we have no freaking idea what to do with our product, so we want a magical product fairy to come and save our asses”. So I’m going to make fun of the term all I want.

** point 1 and 2 both mean “being in charge of the vision and roadmap”