Product Management Vs Program Management
What is Product Management?
A Product Manager strategizes and designs products creating high customer value to achieve business goals.
Product Management is a business function which is primarily responsible for driving organizational goals through the practice of planning, designing, launching, supporting and continuously improving products. This includes doing market research or gap analysis to understand the customer needs and pain points and then going about forecasting, planning, designing, launching products and eventually ensuring high customer value creation in the market.
What is Program Management?
A Program Manager ensures timely, high quality project delivery with optimum system design by managing the available resources tactically.
Program Management is a business function which deals with the management of several related projects / products. The primary focus in the management of these projects is to ensure timely high quality delivery of the projects or products or features. In a typical tech company, the Program Managment has 2 tracks. One which includes support related changes like product enhancements, new features or resolution of defects in the existing product. The second track includes deliveries of larger projects, features, functionalities etc.
Product Lifecycle V/S Project Lifecycle
Product Lifecycle: A typical product lifecycle has 7 phases of Idea creation, validation, Product/Service planning, product/service development, launch, iterating to get the right product market fit and maintaining the product saturation.
Project Lifecycle: A typical project lifecycle constitutes 5 phases of project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring & control and the eventual project closure.
What are the key differences between Product Management and Program Management?
Product Manager Stakeholders V/S Program Manager Stakeholders
The Product and Program Managers have respective business and technology stakeholders as shown in the diagram below. Both work as respective business and technology NODES to work closely with their stakeholders and with each other to deliver the needed projects/products thus creating the planned customer value to meet organizational goals.
Product Manager Skills V/S Program Manager Skills
The Product and Program Managers require a different set of hard skills specific to their roles as shows in the diagram below. The product managers need more business specific skills and the program managers require more technology/engineering specific skills. Both the types of PMs require pretty much the same set of soft skills to ensure their respective deliveries as their roles are quite similar in nature.
Career Path
Typical career paths of product and program managers are as below
Conclusion
The Product and Program Managers are both two important roles in any organization especially in technology driven organizations. They both work with their respective stakeholders and drive the organization forward towards meeting it’s goals and eventual vision.
When both Product and Program Managers work in perfect synergy, it leads to MAGIC!!!
