What is the Difference Between Product Manager and Project Manager?
Large companies may include both project management and product management departments. Sometimes external people face some confusion in understanding the roles of a product manager and a project manager.
Product Manager and Project Manager are completely different roles. The author of Hygger blog gives a simple explanation of how do these roles differ.
A product is an ultimate result that you provide to your customers or users. It can be a physical product, software, service or an app.
A project is a plan consists of different activities that have a defined outcome and fixed start and end dates. When the outcome is accomplished, your project will be completed.
Key responsibilities of Product Manager and Project Manager
- Product managers are responsible for defining the product strategy, feature prioritization, and final release. They create ideas and initiatives to help reach the strategy and goals, using smart roadmaps and managing product backlog.
- Project managers usually less focus on specific product purposes. Their responsibility is the project itself. They take product initiatives and features to develop a timeline, care of risks, potential constraints, resources, and scope. Project managers are responsible for: delivery, status updates, project budget, capacity, team collaboration, problem resolution, and so on.
It is not difficult to assume that if the roles and functions of the managers are different, then their professional tools for effective work are also different.
However, there are some platforms like Hygger, Trello or Jira that offer a set of effective options for both product managers and project managers.