Understanding the roles of product managers, project managers, and product owners

Today we are talking about a frequently asked question, which is how are product and project management related. We’ll discuss the differences and similarities between the two.

Joining us is Peter Monkhouse. He is a product owner and entrepreneur, with NewGenP being his latest company. Peter is an experienced speaker, educator, and consultant with over 40 years of experience leading teams and organizations to deliver value through projects. He has held several roles with the Project Management Institute, including Chair and Director of the Board. Peter’s latest book is Gen P: New Generation of Product Owners who Care about Customers. 

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers
[2:09] Can you share an example of a project that resulted in a new product?

The definition of a project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service, or result.

One project I worked on was the installation of telephone billing systems. A telephone billing system is a product that a telephone company uses to send you those awful monthly telephone bills. We had a project to customize a telephone billing system to meet a company’s unique needs for their customer and then to install it for them to create the telephone bills. That’s an example of a project being used to create and deliver a product. The telephone company used the telephone billing system to generate invoices to get revenue. That allows them to continue to provide telephone service and add new functions and features to their telephone company.

Every project we’ve worked on has delivered a product. And conversely, if we want to add a new feature to an existing product or create a new product, we’re going to do that through a project.


[5:05] What are the key roles involved in project and product management?

The project manager is the person who leads a team to deliver the product or service. Typically, the project manager is successful when they deliver the product on time, on budget, and within the scope and quality that’s expected by the client or the user.

A project manager typically will report to a project sponsor, someone who is accountable for having that project completed on time, obtains the benefits of the product, and funds the project. A project sponsor could be a product owner or a product manager who owns the product and is worrying about the full lifecycle of the product, continuing to add more features and functionality to it to extend the lifecycle of the product and deliver more value to customers.

A product owner could be the project sponsor or a business owner. They could also take the role of a customer—someone who makes sure the product meets the necessary criteria.

In the telephone billing system example, my customer was the IT department, which was the product owner for the billing system. I would deliver the product to my customer who would then test it to make sure it met the necessary criteria to go into production and start being used to generate telephone bills. They also had a product owner on the business side who involved people from the finance department, customer care, and new product development to make sure the billing system would function appropriately.

The product owner will be looking after the product from birth to death. They are trying to understand what value the customer is looking for from the product and what problem the customer has that the product is solving. Then they take that feedback from the customer to see how they’re going to enhance the product to better meet the customer needs and deliver more value to the customer with the objective of trying to make sure the product will stay current and relevant for as long as possible.

I see the terms product manager and product owner being used very interchangeably now. In my book Gen P, we are talking about a product owner as someone who has a passion for the product and who will be the advocate and key spokesperson for the product. The product owner is future-oriented—asking, how is the product going to grow and help the organization be successful?

The product manager might be a more transaction-oriented individual who is just working on getting the product from point A to point B.

[14:51] Can you tell us more about the product owner role and how it’s different from the product manager role?

One of the reasons my co-author Joanna and I wrote our book, Gen P, was we felt that the Agile world had inappropriately used the term product owner. Scrum has used the term product owner to refer to someone who is the internal voice on the project team to represent the voice of the customer. I think this is a disservice to the term. We are talking about a product owner as a higher level role—someone who directs a team of people who will support the product as it goes through its lifecycle. They collect feedback from customers, navigate the internal parts of an organization to come up with a roadmap, and get the funding to continually invest in the product to make sure it’s continually delivering value. They think about how that product will help the organization be successful in achieving benefits, show why it’s important to invest in the product internally, and show customers why they need to acquire the product to be successful. If an organization doesn’t have this role, the product is going to fail.

[21:53] Can you share a story highlighting the importance of product owners?

You might remember the Blackberry phone. The two founders of Blackberry were really the product owners. They were focusing on the direction of the product and thinking about where the technology was going and how they were going to evolve the Blackberry to stay current. They got a lawsuit from IBM about copyright infringement, which occupied their time and energy. At the same time, Apple introduced the iPhone, and Apple convinced US carriers that data should be cheap.  The whole Blackberry model up to that point was based on minimizing data and having higher security. Apple got rid of that advantage, and Blackberry missed it. They missed that change because they were focused on other things, and it led to the demise of the company. This is a dramatic example of where the value of a product owner is—to keep focusing on what’s going on in the marketplace and where the shifts are so they can prepare their product to take advantage of these shifts and not be swallowed up by a competitor as Blackberry was by the iPhone.

[24:31] What is getting in the way in organizations that don’t do a good job understanding customers or executing projects executed well?

Many of the problems that we have around product support are due to the curse of quarterly reporting. Companies that are traded publicly have to issue their results every quarter. If they don’t meet the expectations of the analysts, then the stock price drops, and then the shareholders get upset, and then the CEO gets fired from their nice, well paying job. They don’t want that to happen, so they tend to be focused on large, shorter term decisions in order to make sure that they’re going to meet the expectations for the quarter. The easiest thing to cut is investing in new products.

These organizations will not focus on the future sustainability of the organization. They don’t think about how they’re going to continue to invest in products to make sure they’re delivering value, how they’re going to continue to get feedback from their customers, how they’re going to continue to invest in their project teams in order to deliver the enhancements on time, on budget, and on scope to allow their products to be successful and to hit market in time to stay competitive. If we want our organization to be successful for a long time, we have to continue to invest in our products and evolve.

Organizations are struggling with the complexity of the world today. We have so many technology disruptors coming in. We have the ability to sell anywhere in the world, but so do our competitors. Organizations are struggling to understand who their competitor is or what technologies are coming. That makes it hard for organizations to invest in products and to be willing to take risks.

Action Guide: Put the information Peter shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.

Useful links:

• Check out Peter’s book, Gen P
  
• Visit Peter’s website, NewGenP
  
• Connect with Peter on LinkedIn
  

Innovation Quote

“Projects delivery products, products delivery strategy.” – Peter Monkhouse

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.