Product Manager vs Project Manager: What's the ...

Retail companies juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. Daily operations involve sales associates serving customers and inventory managers tracking merchandise.

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Then, there are staff members who focus on the longer-term performance of the business, such as product managers and project managers. 

The success of new initiatives largely hinges on the collaboration between product and project managers. This article explores the differences between these related roles and the unique skills each demands.

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What is product management?

Product management is the process of identifying customer needs and business objectives, and then developing products or features to meet them. It involves defining success criteria and leading a team to bring the vision to life.

In retail, the "product" often encompasses a company's entire range of offerings, not just individual items. A product manager's role involves analyzing this spectrum and making strategic changes based on market research and identified opportunities or weaknesses.

Consider a women's clothing store with a well-known but underperforming line of suits and separates. Upon investigation, a product manager might discover that this line was added late in the season and placed in a low-traffic area.

To address this, they could propose moving the suits and separates to a more prominent location and expanding the display space. Additionally, they might recommend retraining staff and organizing a store event to highlight this renewed focus on the product line.

Skills needed to be a product manager

Effective product managers require a diverse skill set. While the role demands a broad range of abilities, from communication to business and technical expertise, the essential skills include:

• Balancing product strategy with tactical implementation needs
• Maintaining team rapport while being firm when necessary
• Trusting personal instincts while remaining open to evidence-based decisions
• Conducting market research
• Applying critical and strategic thinking
• Demonstrating leadership and initiative

Challenges of product management 

Product managers encounter significant challenges when carrying out their objectives. Common challenges in a product manager&#;s role include:

• Prioritizing the product roadmap. It&#;s essential to make sure the decision to launch the project is supported by customer feedback, research, and market validation.
• Establishing a smooth company-wide process. If the above-described initiative is for a chain and not a single store, for example, the product manager must accommodate a certain amount of local or seasonal variance in sales emphasis.
• Tension between short- and long-term objectives. A company may not want to leave its current customers behind while moving up in price point.
• Communications. Make sure the team members involved in a product introduction understand the importance of the various steps in the process and their role in carrying them out. 

What is project management?

Project management is the art of steering initiatives to successful completion, ensuring they stay on track in terms of time, budget, and overall plan. A project manager's role is multifaceted, involving target-setting, resource allocation, and guiding the project from start to finish.

Key to a project manager's success is their ability to assemble an effective team and create a realistic schedule. They must also secure the necessary tools and resources for the team, while constantly monitoring progress to ensure deadlines are met and the project remains on course.

In a retail environment, such as a women's clothing store, project management takes on unique challenges. For instance, when relocating merchandise, the project manager must balance the need for change with minimizing disruption to daily sales. They must also coordinate associate training around existing work schedules. If the project involves product mix changes that require repricing, the manager must ensure accurate updates to inventory and point-of-sale systems.

Shopify merchant Loops provides a real-world example of effective project management in action. By implementing streamlined workflows, empowering their teams, and maintaining a focus on deadlines, Loops demonstrates how solid project management practices can drive business success.

Skills needed to be a project manager

Project managers, like product managers, need specific skills to perform effectively. Key attributes include:

• Managing a budget and project timeline
• Adapting quickly to changed circumstances
• Reporting clearly and concisely on progress and problems
• Understanding basic organizational policy
• Resolving conflicts as they occurs
• Project planning

Challenges of project management 

Like product managers, project management professionals routinely face challenges as they put their plans into action. Some challenges commonly encountered by project managers include:

• Setting a clear project scope with goals and objectives. The project manager needs to understand what exactly the team is being asked to do, and when.
• Budget restrictions. Without adequate project resources&#;both in terms of time and money&#;the team will not be able to do what is required. The project manager must make sure the product manager understands this and is able to resolve the problem.
• Team conflict. This most often arises when either the project&#;s objectives are changed or unexpected circumstances arise.
• Impractical deadlines. These often occur as the result of a snap decision regarding a previously scheduled product release. 

The key differences between product management and project management

On paper these functions look similar, but project and product managers are quite different. As successful companies grow and change, it&#;s important to understand the distinctions.

Responsibilities

Product managers are the visionaries behind a product's success. They identify what to create and why it matters. They're also responsible for ensuring that new products and features meet customer needs and align with business goals. 

Their role involves setting the product vision, analyzing market trends, and conducting user research. They then share these insights across teams and communicate with sales, development, stakeholders, and others. 

Product managers also set and track key metrics and act as customer advocates. While product managers develop change initiatives through a series of projects, project managers focus on bringing these projects to life. They assess each project, allocate resources, and create detailed plans for execution. 

Project managers handle everything from initial briefs and kick-offs to progress tracking and workflow implementation. They strive to maintain a neutral, productive environment and often use specialized software to aid planning and implementation.

Overall, product managers determine the strategic direction, while project managers execute the tactical plans to achieve the goals. Both roles are crucial in bringing successful products to market and driving business growth.

Goals

Product managers and project managers have similar goals, and they all boil down to supporting overarching business goals. However, their specific goals vary. 

A product manager&#;s goals might include: 

• Deeply understand customer needs and advocate for future customers.
• Collaborate with and inspire other teams to create compelling technical patterns, design systems, and shared features.
• Continuously build trust and improve the team and product.
• Maintain high standards of quality.
• Solve the most challenging aspects of products and projects.

A product manager&#;s job, on the other hand, might come with the following goals: 

• Ensure projects are completed accurately and on time. 
• Maintain and track budgets. 
• Allocate resources effectively. 
• Complete projects promptly and within budget. 
• Simplify processes to enable others to work more efficiently.

Salaries

In the US, product managers tend to make anywhere from $51,000 to $262,000 per year. Project manager salaries are an average $104,920 annually, ranging from $56,000 to $140,000 per year. While both career paths tend to start around the same mark, product managers ultimately have a higher earning potential. 

Essentially, there&#;s more room for salary growth on the product management side. 

How do project managers and product managers work together?

The project manager and product manager roles share many similarities, but they require distinct skill sets to perform effectively. Both collaborate to ensure products meet customer needs while staying on time and within budget. Product managers provide product requirements and priorities, while project managers translate these into actionable tasks and manage project progress.

When launching a new product, the product manager defines the vision, understands market needs, sets features, and aligns the product with customer demands. They focus on the product's purpose, value proposition, and integration into the overall business strategy. 

In contrast, the project manager oversees the execution of the product launch by coordinating timelines, managing resources, setting up workflows, and ensuring all teams (such as marketing, supply chain, and IT) are aligned and on schedule.

Consider the implementation of a new point-of-sale (POS) system. The product manager would define the required features and user experience of the new POS, ensuring it supports the store's operational needs, integrates well with existing systems, and enhances the customer experience. 

The project manager would be responsible for the actual implementation, including vendor coordination, timeline management, retail location deployment preparation, and risk management.

Using product and project management in your retail store

Radical change has become common in industries across the economy, and retail is no exception. Recent examples include the exponential growth of ecommerce, the emergence of new competitors, and the ever-changing expectations of the customer base. To adapt, retailers have been forced to make both deep and rapid changes in their product offerings and business models.

Product managers determine how their companies need to change and in what timeframe. Project managers enable them to execute those changes while continuing day-to-day operations. Together, product and project managers hold the keys to the future, and it is essential for retailers to ensure these managers understand their roles and work together in harmony.

Project management vs. product management FAQ

Who gets paid more, product managers or project managers?

Product managers and project managers have similar starting salaries, but based on industry averages, a product manager has a higher average salary cap than a project manager. A product manager can make as much as $250,000+ per year, while a project manager typically hits a ceiling of around $150,000 annually.

What is the difference between product management and project management?

Product management leads product strategy and identifies an opportunity that can be met by introducing a new product. Project management then subdivides a related project into a set of constituent tasks, builds a schedule for them, assigns them to the appropriate staff members, and takes responsibility for seeing that each of the specific tasks is completed as scheduled.

Are project management and production management the same?

Project management and production management are similar but slightly different. Production management involves managing production inputs of resources like raw materials, capital, and labor to achieve the output of a finished product. Project management is slightly broader, as it can involve production and other tasks and initiatives, like implementing new business technology or completing a logo redesign.

Of course, that is an abstract explanation of the role. So what is product management? What does the job entail?

Here is the most concise response we&#;ve come up with for the &#;What is product management?&#; question: Product management is the practice of strategically driving the development, market launch, and continual support and improvement of a company&#;s products.

The question, &#;What is product management?&#; comes up pretty often, even from experienced business people. One reason is that product management encompasses a wide-ranging area of responsibilities. Indeed, the role itself means very different things in different organizations.

What is Product Management?

The day-to-day tasks include a wide variety of strategic and tactical duties. Most product managers or product owners do not take on all these responsibilities. At least some of them are owned by other teams or departments in most companies.

But most product professionals spend the majority of their time focused on the following:

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• Conducting Research: Researching to gain expertise about the company&#;s market, user personas, and competitors.

• Developing Strategy: Shaping the industry knowledge they&#;ve learned into a high-level strategic plan for their product&#;including goals and objectives, a broad-strokes overview of the product itself, and maybe a rough timeline.

• Communicating Plans: Developing a working strategic plan using a product roadmap and presenting it to key stakeholders across their organization: executives, investors, development teams, etc. Ongoing communication across their cross-functional teams throughout the development process and beyond.

• • Coordinating Development: Assuming they have received a green light to move forward with their product&#;s strategic plan, coordinate with the relevant teams&#;product marketing, development, etc.&#;to begin executing the plan.
  • Acting on Feedback and Data Analysis: Finally, after building, testing, and introducing the product to the marketplace, learning via data analysis and soliciting direct feedback from users, what works, what doesn&#;t, and what to add. Working with the relevant teams to incorporate this feedback into future product iterations.

Download Jim Semick&#;s Book: &#;The Essentialist Product Manager&#; &#;

What isn&#;t Product Management?

Product managers owning the day-to-day details of a product&#;s development is a common misconception. As we describe on our product management vs. project management page, this is the role of a project manager.

Product management&#;s strategic function

Product management is a strategic function. Tasking product managers with determining a product&#;s overall reason for being&#;the product&#;s &#;Why?&#;

They&#;re also responsible for communicating product objectives and plans for the rest of the company. They must ensure everyone is working toward a shared organizational goal.

Product management encompasses a broad set of ongoing strategic responsibilities. They shouldn&#;t be responsible for the ground-level details of the development process.

Innovative organizations separate this function and assign tactical elements to project managers, such as scheduling and managing workloads. This distinct division leaves the product manager free to focus on the higher-level strategy.

What is the Product Management Process?

There is no single &#;right&#; way to manage a product. Processes will evolve and adapt to the organization, the product lifecycle stage, and product team members&#; and executives&#; personal preferences.

But the discipline has developed some consensus regarding best practices. So while rigid adherence isn&#;t required and there isn&#;t the same level of zealotry as one might find when discussing Agile, the basic tenets are widely accepted.

Defining the problem

It all begins with identifying a high-value customer pain point. After that, people or organizations are trying to do something, and they can&#;t. Or, if they can, it&#;s expensive or time-consuming or resource-intensive or inefficient, or just unpleasant.

Whether it&#;s moving a person or thing from Point A to Point B, finding the perfect gift, reaching the right audience, keeping people entertained, or some other objective, what&#;s currently available isn&#;t quite cutting it. People want something better or something they don&#;t have at all.

Product management turns these abstract complaints, wants, and wishes into a problem statement looking for a solution. Solving that problem and easing that pain is the spark and motivation for everything that comes next. Without a clearly articulated goal that directly impacts that pain point, there&#;s not much hope that the product will gain traction or staying power.

Quantifying the opportunity

There are many problems and pain points, but not all are worth solving. This is when product managers swap their customer-centric hats for a business one.

To justify investment in building a new product or solution, product management must answer the following questions and be able to build a business case based on the answers they find:

• What is the total addressable market?
• Is the problem or pain severe enough that people will consider alternative solutions?
• Are they willing to pay for an alternative solution (or is there another way to monetize the solution)?

Once product management has evaluated the potential market, they can then try to address it if there&#;s a significant enough opportunity.

Researching potential solutions

With a target in mind, product management can now thoroughly investigate how they might solve customer problems and pain points. They should cast a large net of possible solutions and not rule anything out too quickly. For example, suppose the organization already has some proprietary technology or IP or a particular area of expertise to give the company an advantage. In that case, those potential solutions will likely leverage that somehow.

However, this does not mean that product managers should start drafting requirements and engaging the product development team. They&#;ll first want to validate those candidates with the target market, although it is prudent to bounce some of these ideas off the technical team to ensure they&#;re at least feasible. Product management will often develop personas to see whether there&#;s actual interest among those cohorts using any of the table&#;s ideas.

Skipping this step and jumping right into building something can be a fatal flaw or cause severe delays. While there are no guarantees, getting confirmation from potential customers that the idea is something they&#;ll want, use, and pay for is a critical gate in the overall process and achieving product-market fit.

Building an MVP

After validating a particular solution&#;s appeal and viability, it&#;s now time to engage the product development team in earnest. First, the bare minimum set of functionality should be defined, and then the team can build a working version of the product that can be field-tested with actual users.

Many bells and whistles will intentionally be excluded from the Minimum Viable Product, as the goal is to ensure the core functionality meets the market&#;s needs. Nice-to-haves can wait for a later stage in the product lifecycle since there&#;s little point in expending additional resources on an unproven product.

MVPs can test how the product works and the overall messaging and positioning of the value proposition in conjunction with product marketing. The key is finding out whether this nascent product is something the market wants and if it adequately meets its core requirements.

Creating a feedback loop

While customer feedback is essential throughout a product&#;s life, there&#;s no time more critical than during the MVP introduction. This is where the product management team can learn what customers think, need, and dislike since they&#;re reacting to an actual product experience and not just theoretical ideas tossed out in a conversation.

Product management must make it easy for customers to provide feedback and create frequent prompts soliciting it. But, just as importantly, they must process, synthesize, and react to this feedback, turning this input into actionable ideas that make their way into the product roadmap or backlog.

And, not to be forgotten, product management must also establish a method for closing the loop with customers so they know their complaints and suggestions were heard and, when applicable, have been addressed.

Setting the strategy

Assuming the MVP is well received, it&#;s time to invest in a product strategy. The team now knows they&#;re onto something that can get some traction, so goals and objectives must be established to improve the product, bring it to market, expand its reach, and align with the overall company strategy and desired outcomes.

The strategy should be based on reasonable, incremental progress toward achievable goals, with key performance indicators and other metrics defined to evaluate success. These measurables should track with the organization&#;s general objectives and complement what the company already does well (assuming it&#;s not a startup still in its infancy).

More than anything else, the strategy is where product management must secure stakeholder alignment and buy-in. If there&#;s no solid, shared understanding of this fundamental element of the product, then the groundwork is already being laid for future conflicts and disagreements.

Download The Product Strategy Playbook &#;

Driving execution

With a viable product concept, a scalable feedback management system, and a sound strategy, it&#;s time to turn ideas into reality. This means prioritizing potential development items and plotting out the product roadmap.

Product management can utilize various prioritization frameworks to decide which development activities will help the product meet its most important goals quickly and efficiently, cueing things up for near-term work. Of course, everything can&#;t be first, so basing these decisions on which items have the greatest impact on critical objectives is key, including representatives from across the organization. With the initial priorities set, product management can then build out their product roadmap. This powerful tool enables stakeholders to visualize what&#;s on the horizon and why it&#;s relevant to the strategy, particularly if structured around themes and outcomes versus specific features and delivery dates.

Download IMPACT &#;

The People of Product Management

Product management doesn&#;t have too many subspecialties, primarily because product people are expected to do a little bit of everything. However, this career has some variety, along with expected tiers of seniority and additional responsibility.

First, some jobs often get lumped in with product that doesn&#;t belong there. This includes project management, program management, product marketing, and scrum masters.

Each of those critical roles interfaces with the product management team quite a bit. Some organizations may even arrange those jobs into the same groups, such as making product management and product marketing part of the overall marketing organization. But these positions aren&#;t product management jobs, as they don&#;t actively define what is in the product or report to the people who do.

Product Management Jobs

The ideal product management job is&#;unsurprisingly&#;being a product manager. A product manager will usually own one or more products or a horizontal function across multiple products, such as &#;user experience&#; or &#;e-commerce.&#;

Associate product managers and junior product managers are typically new to the domain and have more limited responsibilities. A senior product manager will have a little more seasoning and a broader scope of their role. But these are essentially slightly different flavors of your basic product manager.

Technical product managers are another critical variation of the role. These individuals are often transitioning from a role in the engineering or IT teams and tasked with managing aspects of one or more products requiring a deeper understanding of technical issues, such as infrastructure and APIs.

Agile product managers

In an Agile organization, product owners also may be part of the puzzle. While there&#;s some debate, product owners are often considered part of product management. However, they are distinct from product managers. A product owner is embedded in one or more scrum teams, but their focus is mainly tactical, helping ensure the strategy laid out by product managers is appropriately executed.

As one moves up through the ranks, more senior product management roles have more significant distinctions. For example, a product line manager will own multiple products that are typically related to each other, sometimes overseeing individual contributor product managers that manage a single product or sub-component.

The Product Executive Track

The executive track begins with Director and Senior Director roles. Depending on the company&#;s size, this may be a loftier title for a &#;lone wolf&#; product management professional. But, on the other hand, it may indicate an even broader portfolio of products and the corresponding direct reports to support that.

Vice President and Senior Vice President are similar escalations up the corporate ladder. Those holding these jobs may see more diversity on their staff as they may also end up owning business analysts, UX, product marketing, or other related functions. The apex of a product management career is Chief Product Officer. Although not as common, this increasingly seen role elevates product management to the C-suite. It gives the product the same political weight as Engineering or Marketing, which often indicates an organization is committed to product-led growth. A CPO is typically supported by a larger team and provides directional guidance and coaching rather than diving into the nitty-gritty details of particular products.

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