Product vs. Project Management

Ok, so how many times has this occurred: someone asks you what you do for a living and you tell them that you are a Product Manager and they fire back at you "Oh, so you manage projects?". Grrr, it's really no fair - the two disciplines are really have nothing in common. Well wait a minute, maybe they do. No, no they really are different. Dang it. What's the difference between the two?

A lot of the confusion comes from the simple fact that the two jobs do share a lot of things in common. However, never fear, they really are completely different no matter what your friends or your boss tell you. In a nutshell, the differences fall into three different categories: scope, execution, and results.

Scope: A project manager has the somewhat enviable benefit of having the hope of there existing clear cut boundaries that define what he/she is responsible for. They are responsible for a project that uses resources, has a schedule, and has a clear set of deliverables. A successful product manager on the other hand has a less defined job of creating a successful product. The product will be driven by no so much a set of requirements, but rather a customer need which may be fickle and change over time. A product manager has to be able to see through requirements and determine what the root cause of the customer's issue is and create a product that solves that.

Execution: The project manager is responsible for basically reporting on the status of the project and he/she has a whole host of tools to do this with. However, the product manager is not responsible for designing the product. In fact the product manger does not have to be a subject matter expert - they can mange projects that they know nothing about the underlying technology. A Product Manger on the other hand desperately needs to know everything about how the product works. They need to know the motivation behind every design decision so that they can explain it in non-technical terms to a customer. A product manager is going to have to be able to sell (something a project manager never has to do) his/her product to others both internally and externally.

Results: How is a project manager judged? If a product follows a set schedule, delivers what was requested when it was promised and does not exceed its budget, then it is considered to have been a success. Basically, the less attention a project attracts, the more successful it is deemed to have been. The product manger on the other hand is expected to have created a product efficiently (similar to a project manager's project), but has the additional burden of having to be successful no matter if it is delivered to an internal or external customer. If the product is a runaway success and gets lots of vocal praise from the customer than the product manager is deemed to have done a good job.

Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the jobs. However with due respect to both project mangers and product managers, you can't switch them around and expect success. Product Management really does require a special set of skills - it's an art, not a science.

Have you ever been confused with a project manager? Does anyone in your family really understand what you do for a living? How do you get along with project managers - are you friendly or bitter enemies? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.


Tags: project, project management, product management, IT Product manager, product manager jobs

The Secret To Successful IT Product Management Is ...

... leadership. Sorry in advance for this rant, but I've just about had it with product managers who spent their time whining and complaining that nobody listens to them. Pretty much across the board I've seem organizations where IT Product Managers get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield (on a good day!). In talking with these Product Managers, I think that I've heard just about every excuse that you could imagine: "it's really an engineering company and I'm not an engineer", "they don't work well with women", "most of the team is in India and they think differently", "this is a low priority project", etc. To which I say, just shut up already. The time for Product Mangers to feeling sorry for themselves is over - nobody has time to listen to them anymore.

What's wrong with all of these complaints? The accusing finger of blame is pointing in the wrong direction: it's not everyone else's fault, it's the Product Manager's fault. Yes -- I'm blaming the Product Manager, get over it. We really have done a lousy job of clearly defining who we are, what the qualifications to be Product Manager are, and just exactly what value we bring to the company. Who can blame everyone else for not respecting us?

What's Wrong With Product Managers?
Most (98%) of Product Managers don't understand the #1 rule of being a Product Manager: you are the CEO of your product. I really don't care if anyone told you that you were (normally they don't); however, they sure are going to hold you responsible if it fails so you may as well grab the reigns and start to drive that product wagon because if you don't, then nobody will.

A good 75% of Product Managers then go on to mess up Rule #2 of being a Product Manager: it's all about the people. Do you know what the difference between a project manager and a Product Manager is? Scope. A project manager has a clear start and finish to a project and gets to lose him/herself in tracking the progress of that project. A Product Manager operates on a higher plane and needs to ensure that the world is ready for the product once the project manager is done. Oh, and that the product that was created was the right product with the right features.

What To Do?
So what is a Product Manger to do? Let's keep this nice and simple -- show some leadership. A Product Manger can't "manage" because nobody works for them. Instead, a Product Manger needs to inspire those that he/she works with in order to have them work on those items that the Product Manager needs to have done. IT staff, finance staff, marketing folks, etc. all need to come together and do work at the request of a Product Manager for whom they do not actually work. The only way that this can be done successfully is for the Product Manager to set an example of leadership by showing the team the correct way forward. This means that the Product Manager needs to have great interpersonal skills, lots of time and patience, and the ability to simplify complex product status in order to communicate it to many different parties.

How hard can this be? It turns out that it is very hard. There are lots of different Product Management courses out there; however, there is precious few courses on Product Management leadership. Maybe it's time that Leadership becomes the new focus for all Product Mangers...


Tags: IT Product manager, leadership, project, CEO

How To Make The Best IT Product Management Decisions

Warren Bennis is a smart guy (professor of business administration and chairman of the leadership Institute at the University of Southern California). He's cranked out a book called Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls and it has a few ideas that really relate to how IT Product Managers can make better decisions.

It turns out that the ability to make good judgment calls when you are a Product Manager is very important (surprise!) because of the impact on others that all of your decisions make. When do these Product Managers get called on to make judgment calls? Warrne identified of the most common three areas: people, strategy, and what to do in a crises. We see the impacts of people judgments around us at work every day. Technically gifted folks who get put into a product team management role for which they are poorly suited, great team leaders who get bumped up and become paper-pushers, etc. The successes in choosing the right people for the right job gets reflected in how successful the product will be. The mistakes can cause lots of damage and are expensive to replace and to repair.

Strategy judgments are the big ones that can make or break a career. In today's hyperactive IT product development environment speed is often prized over accuracy. Warren brings up a great IT product example in his book: Intel. Many folks don't realize this, but Intel got its start in manufacturing and selling memory chips. When the prices in this market started eroding and the Japanese manufacturers started coming on strong, Intel had to make a product judgment call: stay in the memory chip business or move on to something else? Gordon Moore and Andy Grove made the decision to move on (to CPUs) and the rest, as they say, is history. Good judgment call.

Finally, the ability to make good judgment calls in in middle of a crisis. Once again Intel serves as a good IT product example. Back in 1994, as Intel was releasing the latest version of their x86 chip line it was discovered that under certain circumstances it would return the incorrect answer from a math operation. Initially Intel took the IT road in its response: it did some math and stated that the average user would only see an error once every 27,000 years. However, that didn't sit well with most of their customers and eventually Intel had to offer to refund/replace the defective chips. This initial response was a very, very poor judgment call on Intel's part.

So what can product managers do to make better judgment calls? Warren suggests that we work on improving four areas of our knowledge that are critical to making good judgment calls: self-knowledge, social-network knowledge, organizational knowledge, and stakeholder knowledge. Hmm, sure sounds like aligning the product management organization with the rest of the business would go a long way to making this a reality!


Tags: crises, Intel, IT Product Manager, judgment, people, strategy

Well Aren't You Special?

So what makes being an IT Product Manger any different from being a regular product manager? Hey, we're better! Well, maybe not BETTER, but we do see ourselves as being part of a very special group: technical professionals who have also been invited to live in the business world.

What this boils down to is the simple fact that what sets IT Product Managers apart from all others is that they need to be good at doing three things (at the same time of course):

1. Think/Act/Breath Like a CEO: simply because you are. An IT Product Manger IS the CEO of his/her product. It is not a stretch to say that the product will succeed or fail based on it's Product Manger's abilities. How's that for some pressure?
   
   
2. Understand the Bottom Line and Up Time: cut 'em in half and you'll find that IT Product Managers don't just have a left brain / right brain thing going on, they've also got a tech / biz thing happening. As we move from meeting to call to meeting, we are constantly shifting gears in order to deal with both sides of the company. We are the bridge between to very different worlds.
   
   
3. Be A SME: this is the key. This is the one feature that distinguishes a Product Manager from a Program Manager. IT Product Managers have to be Subject Matter Experts. We have to truly know our products from the inside out as well as the technologies that they use and why they are needed. More than any other feature, this is what makes IT Product Managers so special -- the immense amount of knowledge that we need to know in order to be able to do our jobs.
   
   

I think that it was Charles Dickens who said "... It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." For IT Product Managers it couldn't be truer. There are times that we feel, move, and act with all of the power of a true CEO. However, then there are those times that we feel overwhelmed with the complexities of everything that we still have to accomplish.

No matter, now you have found this blog and together we shall find a way for you to overcome all problems. Exactly how you are going to do this is a topic for a future posting...