A Product Manager is Not a Project Manager - Brief Analysis of Product Management
I was sitting in the back row, right angle of the university room in central Paris. A new course was about to kick off this semester: Product Management. I had already been exposed to this role during my Notion consulting work. The definition of a product manager is quite blurred for many of us. Is a product manager the same as a project manager? If not, what are the differences? What does a product manager actually do?
I sat down and took my laptop out of the backpack. The room was full of people wearing surgical masks and acting like civilized human beings with the locus of attention on the stage of the room, where a Google product manager and a panel of product managers in tech were standing, and after a while sitting.
A product manager is not the same as a project manager. A product manager is responsible for the coordination and successful launch of products and features, no matter how. Product managers—ideally—do not handle the way in which the product is “shipped”. That’s the job of a project manager and the engineering team. Product managers set a why, a direction, and a what, a description of what the product can look like. Project managers manage the daily todos and organize the practical daily work for the engineering and design team.
Product managers are generalists, in most cases—although the nature of a product manager depends highly on the type of product/industry they are in. The more technical the industry/product, the more useful technical knowledge is. But product managers do not need to code or build the product themselves. That’s the job of engineers. Product managers are the link between engineers and leadership. Their job is to pay careful attention to customers’ needs. The best product is one that addresses customers’ needs in the most effective and precise fashion. Product managers carry out careful customer analysis. That is a crucial component of a product manager’s endeavor. Customers are at the center of every product—and the organization as a consequence. Often, the top leadership may forget this fact and err on the economical optimization side of things. The product manager has the responsibility and ability to bring everyone back to the customer and outline what the customer actually wants based on the research conducted. That is an essential role.
“Product managers are user-centric. They represent the final user in internal discussions with the leadership team.”
Because of their transversal role, product managers need to understand deeply and embody the company vision, mission, values. Failing to do so leads to noise and low signal. Due to their pivotal role in defining the right product to develop, product managers need to stay in tune with the overall business aspirations, while being able to descend into the “trenches” of the business in times of need. Being a link between customers, engineers, and leadership, product managers must have the ability to step back and look at the big picture from a strategic perspective and zoom back in to discuss the daily implications for the engineering team fluidly. This ability can be developed and is powerful. It’s powerful because it gives flexibility of thought, adaptation to the circumstances, empathy.
Product managers need to have just enough knowledge of the technical implications of building the product they are responsible for. In this way, they can make informed decisions together with the engineering or design team. Having an engineering background may be helpful in some specific contexts (e.g., working in AI, machine learning). That’s the minority of the cases, as the panel pointed out during the university discussion.
I closed my laptop and put it back in the backpack. I had not typed any notes. I listened carefully. I was now ready for the next activity: heading to a nearby gym along a large, highly trafficked road in central Paris. The habit is what matters.
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