Hacker News Reader

Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you had a project manager, not a product manager. A good product manager is very valuable.

Last time I saw one of these types of articles on here it quickly became apparent that a lot of companies don't know the difference and call their project managers by the wrong name.

People using "PM" is adding to the confusion.

That’s why I use PMP for Product Management Professional. Much clearer

This adds to the confusion since Project Management Professional is a certification for a Project Manager that specifically uses that acronym and not all project managers have the certification.

I think it was a joke

Alas, the joke is "Too Real" and on all of us.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed that joke. I work in education and the number of redundant acronyms and initialisms (if that's a word) is astounding.

BIT meeting on my calendar. Is it behavioral intervention team or something about the bachelor of information technology or Business Information technology or bachelor of industrial technology or are we talking about income taxes or what?

Agreed, PjM and PdM are what I use when referring to them.

A lot of teams with poor business operations seem to treat project, product, and program management as a generic blob of “help us be organized please” duties instead of specific jobs with specific operational missions.

What is the difference then, between a project manager, product manager, a project owner and a product owner? Always thought they're approximately the same thing. Isn't any product you're working on a project too?

The main difference is between a product and a project. The gist is that projects are short term specific plans while products are a bit more open-ended ideas with continual feedback. Here’s a decent overview: https://martinfowler.com/articles/products-over-projects.htm...

Imo projects are company details, products are what your users see.

The split between project manager and product owner seems clearest.

A project manager is running the team. Who does what and when? How do we plan the work?

A product owner is kind of like the representative stakeholder. What should this do? How important is launching now Vs fixing these bugs?

How Vs what.

Good people in these roles are incredible. I've been fortunate to work with some.

Product Manager: They are essentially the voice of the customer and upper management. They work on the product roadmap and determine the requirements for the product based on the needs that are determined by conversations with the stakeholders as well as other market research. In addition to this they also work on things like product pricing, release strategy, etc.

Project Manager: They ensure that all the tasks for a project get done on time. They make the gantt charts, work with teams to break it down into sections, keep track of budgets, manage risks, report on progress to stakeholders, etc.

I've never worked with a Product Owner since I understand it is mostly a software related position and that is not my area. From what I understand, they are an intermediary that sits between PdM and PjM.

Project management was the role Larry Page once axed in 2001: https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

Sounds like he fired a type of project manager - one who controlled the team. A project manager can manager the team by supporting them and unblocking them while doing non-implementation type work such as managing and reporting the project's budget, managing and reporting progress and delivery aims.

Google currently has program managers (and technical program managers). I could not tell you the difference between them and product or project managers.

Most companies don’t understand what a product manager does, and they are busy eliminating project management roles in favor of an “agile” workflow, so they just repurpose the project managers to be product managers because it’s only two letters different. With predictable results.

It seems like whoever named these titles did a poor job. They’re so close, can you blame people for not seeing a difference?

What is a product but a large project anyways?

A product manager is expected to view things from a business point of view. To identify features for the product and help it succeed in the market.

A project manager is in charge of planing, execution and governance of a project. They don’t define any of the goals or vision.

Saying product is a large project is a big over simplification. If we go that route anything could be called a “large project”.

> Saying product is a large project is a big over simplification. If we go that route anything could be called a “large project”.

Yes. That's precisely the point. What's the difference between "X manager" and a "project manager" when the X itself is obviously a project?

> in charge of planing, execution and governance of a project. They don’t define any of the goals or vision.

This sounds like if you were trying to hire a race-car driver instead hired two people, and put one of them in charge of steering to the left and the other in charge of steering to the right.

this is exactly why back-to-office initiatives have value - it's easier to coordinate when the steerers are next to each other

Navigating and driving the car are two very obviously distinct tasks that regular people and rally drivers split up.

The product manager decides which direction the car should be turned and the project manager turns the wheel.

A project has a planned end date, a product typically doesn't.

Most modern products seem to have planned end dates.

Development phase is the project. Maintenance phase before sunsetting is I guess another project.

Isn't it the other way around? Projects tend to never end. Products eventually get released.

A released product is not the end of the product. See: Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, Gmail, Dropbox, Firefox, etc.

A release ist just the begining of a product. After that you have to collect customer feedbackand figure out what to prioritize for the next release.

My company had project managers and product owners to avoid that verbal confusion.

A project has a defined start and end. You know when it’s done, and you should know that before it even starts.

A product is ongoing. It reacts to business changes.

Project managers co-ordinate the teams and stakeholders associated with a project. It only applies to bigger companies. In smaller projects senior engineers and engineering managers do the same job.

There's sometimes also program managers who organize relevant projects across the company (for example with GDPR compliance a program manager might coordinate between legal and various products, identify risks and report progress to C-level, and each product will have a project kick off to get it into compliance (depending on the effort, the person overlooking this project and working with program might be a dedicated project manager, engineering manager, some engineer etc).

Agree. Similar to a developer vs. SWE.

there is no difference between a developer and an SWE except a fancy title

Which one is fancier?

Software Development Engineer is the one title to rule them all

Disagree. Project manager is extremely different to product. Dev vs SWE is completely arbitrary

What do you see as the difference between a developer and a SWE?

One is DevOps and one is a programmer

They’re both programmers and you can’t “be devops”.

The vast majority of my colleagues would say "that person is a devops" instead of "that person does devops", which I don't get at all. I've assumed it's some deeply rooted misunderstanding of language (my colleagues are eastern european) that has taken hold across the entire local industry.

That didn’t really clarify for me, which is which? What is DevOps to you? (Seems to be different for everyone)

The wiki for “programmer” has “software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder” as interchangeable terms in the first sentence.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer

Reply on news.ycombinator.com