Project Management IS Product Management

A heated debate is going on for years “Don’t call product managers project managers”, “You are doing it wrong, it is not project management”.

This is a topic in line with one of the best product podcasts https://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/

These days if you don’t work in a spotify-like setting in a tech company — you are doing it wrong! That’s the mantra, be it good or bad. Like with any trend it doesn’t work for everyone, but 99% of teams try to apply it anyways.

These teams tend to have product managers as the only ‘managers’ in the room. And these product managers are the ones claiming that their PM titles don’t stand for Project Manager. I don’t blame them, we all read the same articles on how product managers should ask ‘why?’, create vision, lead by example with no authority, know the business/ux/tech and bridge those gaps. Looks a lot, right? We can’t be bothered with gantt charts, dependency management and resource allocation. That’s project management world, ask a scrum master to do that, ask an agile project manager (that’s a weird way to call scrum master or a project manager) or hire someone and call them ‘roadmap coordinator’ (I guess that’s what spotify calls these people).

But more often than not, you won’t have the luxury to hire such a person. Your budget is already stretched with engineering (you don’t want to have less of them, do you?) and design.
Plus, ‘there’s no such role in the modern world’, it is all ‘waterfall retro-approach’, and we are agile, we just need dev+design+product triangle to make miracles.

Why do you still fail your releases in your multibillion startups?

Oh, yes, you are not autonomous enough, right?
You can’t handle an initiative on your own as it spans across multiple teams and you have gazillion of dependencies.
Can we reshuffle teams so, that they become autonomous? Sounds reasonable if you accept that you structured your teams in the wrong way half a year ago (or 2 years ago, to be precise).
But it is not going to happen as the other 3 initiatives overlap with 2 other teams, and their initiatives overlap with 5 other but your teams.
So, it is not about how you structure yourself, you’ve done before, changing it once again will bring you to the same point with a new selection of people, who would need to form new teams and learn how to work with each other from scratch.

Your last resort — become a project manager. As much as you hate it, it is your job now. Time to master new tricks if you didn’t do it in the past.

Risk management, status updates, gantt charts and weekly sync meetings with stakeholders and teams you depend on. Resolving team dependencies, measuring team health (literally you should care who gets sick and who’s there to pick the flag of the team up), asking for resources, restructuring team’s processes all this is part of your daily life now.

But wait…. who’s …. who’s going to do all this market and competitor research now, who’s going to talk to the customers, help to run ux discovery? It is still your responsibility. It looks like there’s no way to maintain the same level of quality of work as you just have too much on your plate.

I’d put it this way. If you can get a dedicated person to take care of initiatives being delivered on budget and within the scope — great, you don’t have a problem!

Otherwise, face the music, and learn how to organise people around you.

Getting less time to do ux research — delegate to your designer
Not enough time for market analysis — bizdev or marketing team can help you if you establish a process around it and escalate before it is too late
Product innovation — don’t tell anyone you wanted to do it on your own, every book that you read says “involve your team in this process”
“Understanding your customers” — that’s not going anywhere from you, just make sure you have the right people to ask for data insights as you won’t have enough time to build reports and dashboards yourself anymore no matter how good your sql skills are

“Steve Jobs” style of PMs will still exist in the industry, very domain specific ones as well (developer tools, bio-tech …), but the mainstream shifts into “get things done” generalist kind of role, who are comfortable with doing project management.

p.s. just as I finished drafting this post a new episode of This is product management aired with the topic “Getting Stuff Done is Product Management” https://player.fm/series/this-is-product-management/130-getting-stuff-done-is-product-management