Product Management vs Project Management

Submitted by Project Manage…
in
Management and Leadership

I am curious to know how you think these roles are best structured. Should they all be subsets of the product development group or should they be 2 separate entities? Which one works best? In my opinion, keeping them all within product development lends itself to everyone being on equal footing and being stakeholders in the success of the project. To me, having them in separate groups feeds the notion of the 2 groups always being at odds and not working toward a common goal. What do you think?

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Submitted by G.R. Regas on Saturday October 10th, 2009 9:15 am

We are working through this in our organization right now.  
Please take a look at this link: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/ - it does a great job of describing what Product Management is and should be.  
In my opinion product management and project management are two very different things and should be separate.  Product management is about deciding what to do and what not to do.  Project management is about making a plan for the actual development and executing it.

Submitted by Steve Johnson on Monday October 12th, 2009 9:33 am

Regas called it: "Product management is about deciding what to do and what not to do."
Many organizations seem to struggle with this difficulty--and product managers and proJECT managers are both complicit. Some product managers are actually managing projects; many project managers are trying to manage the product life cycle.
I wrote about the title problem in http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/topics/06/0603sj/
Also check out http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/1/2/07sj for more about the three roles of product management.

Submitted by Mavenlink Discount on Tuesday February 19th, 2013 7:43 am

As you said, product management can't be compared with project management. Last year when i started thinking about working on freelance, i had needed people that are interested on my business, then we could share our experiences and our competences. I think we can see it as a project management. this wasn't about the product but the network.