Cinzia PellegrinoTransformation & EPMO Director | PMIHamburg, Germany
It’s common for people to confuse product managers and project managers — even within industries that employ both. Just ask any product manager (PM), or project manager (also PM), and they’ll tell you they’ve been referred to like the other more times than they can count.
I’ve worked with countless project managers in my career. I have even played the dual role on occasion.
So, what is the first step towards a successful working relationship between product and project managers and what role will prevail in the forthcoming future? Saving Changes...
Where both roles exist, it is likely that a product manager would play a key stakeholder or even sponsor role on projects which will represent a significant evolution of a given product, the initial launch of the product or the decommissioning of the product.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Both are totally diferent roles strating for both roles focus. An let me added a.thrid: the business analyst. Adding to this today there is more confusion because whe you say the name people thinks on software. I have perdormed all those roles and I have contributed to create standards from them. At the end are roles and the same person can perform all of them at the same time (I did that). In my personal opinion, the worst thing a.company can do is not maintain the roles splitted among different persons if it is possible Saving Changes...
Product takes precedence over project. If product is optimally managed then product development and improvement ought to become a BAU activity without the stop-start interruptions of projects. Saving Changes...
From my experience the roles are mutual exclusive. This does not mean that they can't coexist it just means that I haven't seen them coexist.
A software company for which I worked as a contractor was developing and delivering to external customers a software suite.
They had two relevant department related to that software suite: - an engineering department that was maintaining and enhancing the software making frequent new releases to it. - a services department that was implementing the software to external customers also developing customization for it; the services department was also offering customer support.
The engineering department performed its work as operations and and as such it did not have and did not work with project managers. The department had product managers, well actually I am not sure if they technically worked for the department but they were working with it.
The services department when was implementing software to customers was operating in project mode and was using project managers to manage the projects. When it was offering customer support it was operating in operations mode without PMs. However the PMs and the customer support engineers were collaborating for instance if the customers wanted new customization the PMs were called to deliver them.
I imagine that the product department could have worked with internal projects and in this case internal project managers could have worked alongside product managers.
In my opinion neither the Project Manager nor the Product Manager would prevail, the need for any of roles is dependent on the type of activity. Having both roles on the same activity, while possible, it makes little sense for me, it would be just a waste of money with no benefit. Saving Changes...
