Product Management Corner

From Project to Product:

Move from Project way of working to Product approach looks trivial but during last months I discovered it is not. There are a lot of things that are different: the horizon/time, the funding, skills, the way of working, the mindset…

If you are not aware of those differences, you can underestimate the impact.

The Horizon – The Why and the Value Proposition: A product approach requires a medium long-term view and organisation commitment. Products are focus on the outcome,  projects on the output.

The Funding – The How and the Team:  Product teams are funded to work on a particular business problem over a period of time rather than a set of functions to deliver. For a product, budget may vary every year but it should be enough to fund a continuos core development team during the product life. Meanwhile, in a project, you need to have the ability to ramp up and ramp down according with project milestones. For a product team you need long term stable capacity.

The Skills – The Who and the Skills: The unification of all the teams is the cornerstone for a product. When you move to product approach, the product development area (building the software) usually gets the attention but very few organizations understand what product strategy means. You need skills that usually you don’t have in an IT project: marketing, communications, analytics, customer service etc. You cannot underestimate the need to have new skills or reskilling some people.

For all these differences, it is not the same a Project Manager than a Product Manager, but it is a common mistake to think both are the same role.

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