This, plus if you see them mentioning the Henry Ford ‘quote’ about horses you can reliably close the browser tab because they’re about to build a straw man argument against doing basic customer/user research.

Isn't it nice that those meme-like anecdotes, or whatever they are exist? Other examples are the Maginot Line in WW2, Amazon was never profitable, ERP systems suck because of their sales reps playing golf with their clients...

Interesting, I’ve always thought of this quote justifying deeper user research than just asking users what they want, not less. I’ve seen people who don’t really understand user needs over index on what they say they want versus deeply understanding their workflow and needs.

The quote is designed to make you understand that building products is about understanding problems, not listening to desired solutions.

A PM's job is to be the owner of the "problem space", while the engineering teams job is to be the owners of the "solution space".

Fords point was that his customers would only ever tell him about solutions they wanted (faster horse). When in actual fact what mattered to Ford was the problem (current modes of personal transport being expensive, unreliable, uncomfortable, slow, single-person).

Any good PM should be able to explain this to you. OP has never worked with a proper PM apparently... Just BA's and Project Managers that wanted a pay bump.

> As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably

This is quite common. Lots of ex-project managers are now called product managers or scrum masters. But they're actually project managers.

That would fall into the realm of product owner, who are meant to keep things in-line with committed timelines and keep teams working on outputs, different from product managers as they have significantly less headache and scope of responsibility.

Yeah but the fact that OP buys into the trope that they're the same thing kinda speaks to the point that they have no idea what a PM actually does.

If you go by volume, you may well find that the theoretical definition you're referring to is outnumbered by the practical reality. I definitely wouldn't assume that reality matches theory.

I'm going by my personal experience as a PM. To be fair, whenever I talk on a PM panel I tend to be the odd one out.

For example, I tend to be the guy on the panel all the other PM's hate because I taught myself to code so that I could have deeper empathy for how my engineering teams work and now I advocate for all PM's needing to be at least moderately technical.

Rocking the boat certainly doesn't make you popular haha

Yes - totally agree. It's a tricky job, and there are real product people, of course, but I think there has been a bit of a migration away from the slightly unfashionable "project manager" into roles such as this one, flooding it.

Also, Product has in some places gone from a valued member of the team to a ruling class, with all the faux problems that generates.

It's a funny one!

What are these two roles about? What differentiates them? Asking genuinely as someone not in the tech sector.

Within the tech sector, project management refers to the set of competencies and tasks around coordinating projects - a lot of stuff around task tracking, reporting progress, unblocking problems that come up, and so on. Product management refers to a set of competencies and tasks for making sure you're building the right thing to solve the right problem. Tasks like conducting market research, user research, and crunching product metrics/analytics generally fall more on the "product" side than "project" side.

The actual boundaries tend to be a bit fuzzy because a lot "product management" comes down to doing whatever the team needs in order to make sure a good product is delivered, and by necessity product managers often do a substantial amount of project managing.

Typically you'll see people conflating "program management" and "product management" in tech. You don't usually see "project management" in that mix since that tends to refer to a more industry agnostic discipline.

The key responsibility (and purpose) of a project manager is to manage and organize the execution of a project so that it achieves the goals which were defined for that project.

The key responsibility (and purpose) of a product manager is to provide a coherent vision of what the product needs to be successful and define what the ongoing projects' goals should be to effectively improve that product.

Engineer - how to build; project manager - how to organize building; product manager - what to build.