PM vs PM vs PO vs PjM vs PMM
Who are you, adventurer?
Okay, so there’s a million articles about the difference between Product Managers, Project Manager, Product Owners, and so on.
However none of them give you a complete answer, in this article I will try to do just that.
I will give try to pinpoint the main “thing” that each of these roles should be ideally responsible for in 3 categories:
- Focus
- Key Activity
- Planning
Disclaimer: All of these roles are relatively new in the world, they are ubiquitous, and each company may have a different view on them, this is what I think after going though tons of material about this topic and my own experience.
Product Manager
- Focus: Product Market Fit & features
- Key Activity: Market research, Prioritization, Requirements
- Planning: Product Roadmap, Product Backlog
Program Manager
- Focus: Program efficiency
- Key Activity: Cross-Team communication
- Planning: Initiative roadmap
Product Owner
- Focus: Features
- Key Activity: Requirement definition
- Planning: Product Backlog
Project Manager
- Focus: Project delivery
- Key Activity: Coordination & Reporting
- Planning: Gantt Chart
Product Marketing Manager
- Focus: Messaging & Launch
- Key Activity: Outbound communication
- Planning: Go-To-Market plan / Launch plan
Okay, so, as you can see a lot of stuff has been left out for the sake of simplicity, you or people in your organization working in these roles might be doing more stuff or less stuff, and a lot of that depend on the scale and the type of company.
For example in smaller startups product managers may be responsible for all of this stuff, a project manager may be responsible for writing technical documentation or product requirements documents, but what I am trying to do here is to provide a clear cut birds-eye view of what it should ideally look like.
Agree? Disagree? Want to set up a short call to discuss our options?
