Project Management versus Product Management

Hi George,

Perhaps the hard part is getting everyone to agree on exactly what project management is. The PMBOK (6th Ed) says that projects are "temporary" and "a project has a definite beginning and end" in other words you start out with the intention of finishing, even if you don't know exactly what the definition of the finishing point is when you start.

Ultimately we all know that everything is temporary. Does that imply that all management is project management? Surely the differentiator that most people have in mind is that project management starts with the assumption that the work is only temporary. Product management requires no such assumption, indeed product management is often concerned with extending the value of the product for as long as possible whereas project management is more often interested in shortening the life of the project.

Luis,

in my view, being predictive is a defining characteristic of the agile movement (in that it states agile is not predictive?).

Project management can be more or less predictive, in the end stakeholders want security and understand what the future might hold. Even agile frameworks predict the future, e.g. if Scrum plans for 10 sprints, you know what it costs and how long it takes, you just do not know what you will get.

Product management is important but also predictive. If I want a bridge, I plan for a bridge. But product management is very specific to the industry.

Project management tries to apply to all industries and products, so it cannot be as specific as a product development approach.

Another way to look at it: PM organizes the work, product management the deliverables.

Thomas

Hi George,

Perhaps the hard part is getting everyone to agree on exactly what project management is. The PMBOK (6th Ed) says that projects are "temporary" and "a project has a definite beginning and end" in other words you start out with the intention of finishing, even if you don't know exactly what the definition of the finishing point is when you start.

Ultimately we all know that everything is temporary. Does that imply that all management is project management? Surely the differentiator that most people have in mind is that project management starts with the assumption that the work is only temporary. Product management requires no such assumption, indeed product management is often concerned with extending the value of the product for as long as possible whereas project management is more often interested in shortening the life of the project.

Product management and project management can both be managed either with predictive or adaptive approaches.

The key difference is not the management approach but the fact that projects start out with the intention of reaching a definite end point whereas products often have no particular end point to aim for. A product could last indefinitely (and during its lifetime may involve one, multiple or no projects at all).

An adaptive approach may therefore be more appropriate for product management just because the end is less likely to be predictable.

Dear Luis,

yes, there are examples of banks and Fintec creating and enhancing financial products permanently.
My own bank, ING, is a good example, but also Russia's Sberbank (which learned a lot from ING and has a compelling business case). But I have also seen recently big banks doing quite traditional transformations.

Have look at the ING story:
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financ...-transformation

Thomas

I don't think that the issue is how we define terms or that product management is above all, but rather whether either is purely or even mostly predictive/adaptive.

Product management may include significant iterative and incremental changes, but there is a larger lifecycle management plan into which those changes fit, frequently with well defined phases. The system architecture of products must often consider the entire lifecycle as the product in the context of its environment. That includes things like planned upgrades, maintenance at known intervals, and retirement.

If you do not consider the product lifecycle while managing incremental changes, then you can run into issues like extra down-time by not implementing upgrades during planned maintenance, maintenance that does not consider future maintenance, or upgrades close enough to retirement where there is no ROI.

As you said, product lifecycles may also include many projects. If projects are considered "predictive", and product management contains projects, then it follows that product management contains predictive approaches.

Assuming that product management is better in iterative or incremental approaches seems to assume change implementation does not consider future changes or include projects. Either that or the terms predictive, iterative, and incremental are really internal jargon that include our own assumptions and context.