Product management and Project management

Product and Project management are closely sounding and often confused terms. Today, I try to find the differences between these two job roles.

A project manager often focuses on delivering the project within schedules and estimates. On the other hand a product manager will want to fill as many features as have been observed in the market or derived from customer needs.

A project manager usually moves to a different project after the completion of the project. This new project may or may not be related to the earlier project. The product manager will continue to work on the product after each release depending on the product life cycle. Typically there are different management techniques required during the different stages in the life cycle of a product.

Priorities, business objectives of a product manager are different than a project manager.

Somethings to remember before we derive any conclusions,

• A good Project manager may not be a good product manager and vice versa

• A Product manager does not necessarily mean that he would be good in managing projects

• Smaller projects constitute parts of a product. So in certain scenarios, a product manager thus may require to act as a project manager.

In conclusion, it would be safe to assume that inorder to avoid conflicts between product management and project management, product managers, project managers, and project teams should all agree on shared goals and objectives as much as possible.