What is the difference between the key management positions that influence your product? Find out who you need for your product.

Published in

Zipper Studios

6 min readJul 15, 2021

To understand the differences between Product Manager, Product Owner and Project Manager, let’s take a look at the stages of a product’s development and where these roles come into play. There are 3 important phases of product development and each of them is vital to the success of the product.

Product Discovery Phase

Product discovery is the initiation phase, where the Product Manager understands the idea/business case/etc and talks to all stakeholders involved. By asking the right questions, the Product Manager will know what is most important for stakeholders in this phase and knows what product/features to build.

The Product Manager sets the product vision and strategy. This role defines the release process and identifies the cross-functional activities necessary to bring the product (or feature) to market. This work is not one-and-done — it continues through the entire lifecycle of a product.

Define Phase

After this discovery product meeting, the Product Owner starts working on the estimates based on elements we agree on. The Product Owner uses User Stories as an informal, general explanation of the software feature written from the perspective of the end user. The purpose is to articulate how a software feature will provide value to you as the customer and to describe the features from the perspective of the software development process. This serves as an internal customer expert for engineering and development teams, answering questions and clarifying requirements.

Product Development Phase

In this phase we have all the information needed to build your fully functional product. The Project Manager makes sure that the implementation and actual development follows the approved proposal. Our engineering principles, based on an Agile workflow, ensure that we build a top-notch product, from start to finish.

Product Manager vs. Product Owner vs. Project Manager Compared

In order to understand the roles more clearly and to be able to differentiate them, we deepen the set of responsibilities each role actually embodies.

1. The Product Manager

Requirement Gathering: In order to start with any product or service, the Product Manager needs to gather details about the driving need for the product and the target customers it will benefit.
Identifying Issues and Opportunities: To design and promote a product, the Product Manager needs to be well aware of the issues driving the need for the product. In order to understand how to serve it better, the Product Manager determines the problems and how to create solutions through the product in question.
Setting Priorities and Strategy: Once the issues and opportunities are laid down, the Product Manager needs to make their pick. Now is the time to develop a strategy to work with the information and resources at hand. This means deciding which of the issues are more important and must be covered by the product.
Roadmap Creation: Since product management is a long-term process, it is only natural to create a roadmap — a route the product/service needs to follow through its evolution.
Collaboration: Once the roadmap is defined or while it is in the process, the Product Manager starts working with various teams to get the product started. This includes design, marketing, sales, manufacturing, customer support and whichever team or external clients may be involved.

2. The Product Owner

The Product Owner supports the development team by prioritizing the product backlog and creating user stories. They serve as an internal customer expert for engineering and development teams, answering questions and clarifying requirements.

Both the Product Owner and the Product Manager work towards a common goal — to build and improve products that create meaningful value for customers and all stakeholders within the company.

Vision: The Product Owner understands the business and the problem the project is working to resolve. The Product Owner can gain comprehensive insight into the needs of the customers and users of the software to be developed.
Strategy: The Product Owner shares objectives with the Product Manager and reviews the product roadmap. This helps the Product Owner avoid making ad hoc decisions that might conflict with broader business priorities. In turn, Product Owners should ask Product Managers for additional clarity when they need more information about what is most important.
Communication with customer: The Product Manager will equip the Product Owner with insights into customer requests and the Product Owner will ask for relevant information about the user experience. This empowers the Product Owner to prioritize the product backlog and support the development team as they build the features that users desire.
Project Initiation: The Product Owner is responsible for the end result in a project. However, instead of defining straight up rules and tasks to complete, the Product Owner carries out the planning through team discussions. After discussing the important elements of a project, the Product Owner devises a set of sprints with backlogs encompassing stories for task completion.
Project Implementation: The Product Owner works closely with the team and Project Manager and monitors the progress through sprint planning and sprint retrospective meetings. The Product Owner assigns the tasks to be done by team members and the team is answerable to the Product Owner.
Project Completion: At the end of a project, the Product Owner can present the deliverable to the customer along with the entire team. Instead of bearing the entire responsibility, the customer can discuss the required changes with the entire team or accept the deliverable altogether.

3. The Project Manager

The Project Manager oversees the project and ensures that deadlines are met. They manage all of the cross-functional work that is required to deliver a complete product experience. This role is also internally focused, coordinating complex work across many teams and many dependencies.

Information Collection: From the ideation of the project, the Project Manager needs to be on top of the game. The Project Manager needs to be well informed, having collected the required information in terms of possibilities, project threats and resource optimization.
Decision-Making: The Project Manager is the decision maker. The Project Manager has a major word in how the projects will be initiated, planned, monitored and delivered.
Organization and Detail: The Project Manager is highly responsible for the project outcome and needs to be meticulously organized and detail oriented. A slight oversight or mistake can cause dire consequences, incurring cost and time wastage so the focus is on organization and attention to detail.
Collaboration: The Project Manager is a central source for communication between the team and stakeholders and is consistently in touch with the teams as well as the customers. It mostly comes down to the Project Manager to keep the team motivated and stakeholders happy.
Conflict Resolution: As with all decision making, the Project Manager also needs to be on the look-out for potential conflicts and have plans established to tackle them.
Project Monitoring: The Project Manager continuously reviews and regulates team progress and performance and tracks the project to ensure it is on schedule and does not encounter any potential roadblocks.
Project Completion: The Project Manager completes the projects in every aspect. This includes the project deliverable, payment processing and project closure.

Conclusion

There are multiple perspectives on these 3 roles in management. All types of managers are essential to achieve the goals of stakeholders. Without them, teams and clients are exposed to chaotic management, unclear objectives, a lack of resources, unrealistic planning, high risk, poor quality project deliverables, projects going over budget and delivered late. Therefore, a successful product is a product that has a great management team working to achieve the product goal.