11–20 of 314 posts
Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…
Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…
I’ve also found that in addition to the Project Manager turned Product Manager, there are plenty of Product Managers forced to be Project Managers and it goes poorly unless a Development Manager is willing to carry that.
The ultimate problem is that Project Management doesn’t go away just because a company eliminates the role. The same is true for Product Management. If you’re ok with your developers or someone else doing the work, and it is fruitful, great. For about a decade I tried as hard as I could to get one of the limited Product Managers for the products I worked on to very little avail. As a result I had to guess about price increases and other functions that I, someone with 70% of a CS degree and some extension courses in business topics, have to learn on the fly each time I face the challenge. I was successful but I am sure a real Product Manager would have done a better job.
The companies I’ve worked for typically have a cynical view of dedicated Project Managers but I appreciate that this is a specific skill for similar reasons to my Development Manager forced to be a Product Manager experience.
Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…
This matches my experience over 15 years and four companies. This is not a scientific study but I can at least concur with your experience. There are clearly orgs that don’t work this way, but I find that it’s very common when chatting with my PM colleagues. The exceptional cases have been project managers for projects that involve wide scope, multiple products, or some other factor. I’ve also found that in addition…
I think its one of those roles that you don't need until product (project) scope is a certain point, but it's been glommed onto smaller companies as they mimic the big-corp designs. So it never quite works for those small shops. They really just need a Product Person, singular, who drives the thing forward, IMO.
As a developer, and a development manager, the best product managers I've worked with rarely got involved in the "how". Sure, they may generate epic-level tickets in your back log, but lower than that, they trust you and the project people to get things done. Problem is, the org needs to support that, and in most companies, the work that gets the most attention isn't visionary or growth focused, it's whatever is maki…
There must be a balance. There must be some basic understanding by the PM/POs. They cant be the person that barley can use a computer.
Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…
No, that's when the founders need to hire actual managers. Their staff is already used to involvement in product decisions, right?
Then there are a bunch of traits and activities of PMs listed. I would think that the time to hire a PM is when the founders can't do that list of things, if that's what PMs do.
> it's easy to overestimate how many an organization needs
Why? The article avoids addressing that, telling us when to hire and how to right-size, but doesn't bother defining the problem being solved.
My experience is that the more devs there are per PM, the more the PMs start thinking they're "in charge of" the devs and then no one's happy. I'd like to see more of a "PMs as customer research consultants" model instead - contribute something that the devs don't have time to do.
How many frontend engineers to backend?
How many engineering managers to ICs?
How many technical writers to (all) engineers?
How many product managers to (all) engineers?
And I try and keep the ratios finely tuned to have the greatest impact but the least meddling, the least micromanagement.
What the numbers for these ratios are is likely specific to your organisation, but if you detect meddling or too much of the "how" not coming from the engineers themselves, change the ratios, increase engineers per people or product manager, make it so that they cannot do this and instead have to prioritise what they get involved in, to step back from the micro, and to cede autonomy on how back to the engineers.
Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just…
Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just…
Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…
Why not also be the developer if you can do that much already?
It’s another job altogether. That doesn’t mean I won’t follow the technological trends, educate myself or refuse to program anything. I wrote some postman script to validate what’s happening with our api, know the infra behind it, and can generally point people in the right direction. I have to know the product inside out to make educated answers when something goes wrong or if a decision is required.
It’s often a people job. And that’s something I try to share with the teams I work for.