The Difference between Project Management and Product Management

This is a guest post by Trapper Markelz. For more information about Trapper, see the end of this post.

The road to a successful project is littered with over-promised, over-time, over-budget, and under-delivered products. We have all been on these projects, and it is because of them that all of us are seeking new methods and processes that make us stand out as project management professionals.

But, there is a shift happening, and we have to be ready for it. As the tools to develop products advance, the cost of designing and writing code continues to fall. New engineering processes have come along, like Xtreme, Pair, Iterative, Agile and SCRUM, which give us new ways of creating project structures. New interaction patterns have been created under the classifications of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, the social web or the semantic web, that equip us with a host of definitive user expectations to design against. All of these things make it easier to create products at faster rates and higher levels of quality.

If this is the case, why do projects continue to fail? Why do they – without an end in sight – continue to suck up time, money and resources? And why, when they are complete, only deliver a sliver of additional value – or worse, none at all? Because despite modern shifts in technology, design and process, we continue to be project managers, when we really should become product managers.

The main difference between a project manager and a product manager is empathy. In the face of customer requirements, it’s time for us to learn a new level of humility. It’s no longer about getting the train to run on time. Rather, it’s about ensuring that the journey to value for both the customer and the participants of the product is fulfilling. Only through complete empathy with our customers can we accomplish this.

Robert Scoble recently gave a talk at the Technonomy conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, called “Are YOU from the future?” He lists out a variety of popular products (Gmail, Facebook, Photo sharing applications, etc.) and reminds us that these actions – while everyday to us – aren’t as common to others. In fact, most people will never use many of these products or services.

Some examples that mean you are from the future include:

• You’ve written some filters on Gmail to filter your emails.
• You’ve shared something that once used to be private.
• You watch TV online.
• You use Salesforce Chatter, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, Box.net or Yammer at work with your coworkers.
• You know the difference between uploading a photo to Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, or Facebook, and why you would use one versus another.

What Robert Scoble is illustrating is the massive disconnect between all the different products, the differentiating features of these products, their value propositions, and the average person on the web.

Think about the last project you worked on and all the features in there. How many of those features were made for someone from the future? How many of those features were responsible for your project going over-budget or missing the deadline?

As product managers, it is our job to build a product for people. As such, we need to take massive steps to start better understanding the people we are building for and scope our projects ONLY to test those assumptions. This isn’t a new idea; it is the cornerstone of customer development and the pursuit of product/market fit. Both of those concepts start to actually matter when you move from being a project manager to becoming a product manager.

Many project managers really don’t care if the end product is successful, and many times a project manager doesn’t really care if the product is useful. They are given a spec and are told when the product is needed by. Project managers maximize efficiency and control for change.

But it’s time to stop thinking like this. Instead, let’s treat every project like a start-up. Ask yourself who you are building this for. What does success look like? What are your assumptions? How do you test these assumptions and learn if you’re attracting the target group of customers to your product? From large enterprises to small start-ups, empathizing with your customers begins with building something they will actually use.

Cultivating empathy isn’t easy, but there are some useful steps to do so:

1. Learn to embed yourself in the culture of your customers. Who are they? What do they want? What part of you is also a part of them?
2. Learn that it is never the customers fault if they don’t know how to use your product. Don’t get caught up in the self-congratulations of building something to spec. Instead, get more caught up in building it to the specifications needed for success.
3. Get comfortable with the idea that all you have are guesses. Even the best design from the best designer is a guess until someone uses it. Your best shot is to get it up quickly, validate it with real customers, learn, and iterate.
4. Don’t forget to cultivate empathy for the other members of your team. They face their own challenges balancing expectations, velocity, and their own measures of success. It helps as a product manager to have as much of a sense of engineering and design as possible. Part of your life-long learning as a product manager should be an intimate knowledge of both the tools and the people needed to create success.

A part of me hopes that over time, the “Project Manager” title will fall away. Given the rapid pace of change in technology, we are quickly leaving the realm of the definitive project and are now entering the continuum of the product. We’re going to need a new generation of individuals who are less enchanted with long timelines, large budgets and deadlines, and, instead, are more prepared to manage the unknowns of a customer-driven process.

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Trapper Markelz (@trappermarkelz) has over 10 years of direct experience building consumer-facing web products that focus on community and conversation. Prior to MeYou Health, Trapper was at GamerDNA, a digital gaming media company committed to developing customer value through the real-time observation and understanding of gamer behavior. Trapper also co-founded 360voice.com, an online Xbox gaming community, and pioneered auto-blogging technology to drive new ways of interacting around games using data. He also worked in Chicago, IL for Spencer Stuart and Associates, pioneering agile development strategies and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he graduated in 1999 with a degree in Information Technology, and now lives in Arlington, MA, with his wife Maureen and two daughters, Lucy and Hannah.