Posts Tagged ‘Offshore’
Offshore Product Management vs. Project Management
I recently decided to start looking for a job back in India with the idea of moving back in 2008. And, having been in IT consulting arena for the last 15+ years as either a consultant or a consumer of consulting services I decided to try my luck with product firms that have setup shops in India. While I came across a number of job posting I have had a tough time getting past the gatekeeper – the recruiters. All of them refuse to accept that there is a lot of transferrable skills. So, finally, in my frustration I decided to talk to two of my friends who are in product delivery business. One of them made the successful transition from IT services delivery to Product Delivery. What I heard was not all new but there were enough subtleties.
Product Management is about defining the product – its features, target market, selling it internally to get funding, getting it done and then selling it externally to make money. Some key aspects of Product Management are understanding the market, doing competitive analysis, determining the value of the features, priortizing the features, creating a product roadmap and executing to timeline.
Project Management is about managing the delivery of the project – the features, selling the project to sponsors to get funding, selling it to the users and getting it done. Some key aspects of Project Management are understanding the purpose of the project, doing the value analysis, determining the features in scope, priortizing the features and executing the project.
You may not agree with my definitions verbatim but you would agree that it is mostly right. And, you would agree that they look awfully similar but for one or two points.
Product Management is about building for an unknown group of people with known characteristics. As one of the persons I talked to said – I bet even the mother of the guy who manages Excel development does not like the top ten features he has on the list. But, the list was created by doing market analysis (what percentage of the market finds this compelling?), competitive analysis (what kind of differentiation does this offer our product over competitors?) and cost/timeline (can I get these into the product at a reasonable cost and can I make the timeline we shared with the market?)
Project Management is about building for a known set of people with unknown characteristics. Ever wonder why a lot of websites suck – these are products that were built and treated as projects. I say “people with unknown characteristics” because often these known people decide to change their minds, repriortize on “whim” etc… Yet, for successful project management it is important to get everyone involved to be objective about the feature set and the changes requested. In short, a well disciplined project management function looks a lot like a well disciplined product management function esp. when you introduce iterative development concepts like SCRUM and the associated release management process.
There still remains three big differences. The first one is the Roadmap. A good roadmap can generate and sustain interest in the product. A compelling roadmap is in some cases an absolute necessity to get users to cough up cash for your new product. In case of Project Management, very rarely is there a roadmap. And, even when it is there it does not take the same level of importance as it does in Product Management. The second is Product Management priorities get affected more directly by the market. Your product and its features is your response to market demands and your positioning. It requires you to be ruthless with the features when necessary. Project scope get affected by business demands which may or may not be driven by market demands. The reason I say “may not” even though in reality it should is that very few companies have their IT strategy and systems in sync with their business strategy. It is less likely for a Project Manager to be ruthless about scope possibly because of the fact that customers are “known” and so forms “emotional attachment.” The final important difference is quality. In a product release the quality of every release including the initial release has to be very good as it is hard to get the user to update/ apply patch after the product has been released. The user acceptance happens after the purchase of the product in the user’s environment. In contrast, most projects have a standard “warranty” phase followed by a support phase to take care of bugs that have been missed out during testing and user acceptance.
When we talk about offshore product management some of the functions that are unique to product management like market analysis, competitive analysis, roadmap definition, feature priortization etc… do not move offshore. They remain close to the consumer. What moves is the development of the feature set to a defined timeline. For, good number of the companies the offshore center starts off as a cost center and then become a profit center without a way to generate profit other than cut costs (in short, a toothless tiger).
