Product or Program Management - What's in the name?

The Writeup

We all have been playing a role of product manager, program manager and project manager since childhood. People like me (non-MBA graduate) didn’t realize it until I saw these roles very closely in a product based companies. And when I saw it, I realized that we all have been doing it in professional life as well as in personal life in an unstructured manner.

Product can be anything which solves customer problem. It can be in any form: any item (physical or virtual) or service. All the task or set of activities we do to solve the problem falls under product management, starting from identification of customers, knowing their painpoint, understanding possible solutions, getting the solution done, serving the solution to customer, understanding whether the solve was good enough to solve the problem. etc..

Program is simply an ongoing thing/ set of activities to achieve a goal. And all the task we do to meet that goal falls under program management, starting from identifying a program objective, putting together a plan to achieve the goal, different ways to achieve the goal, assessing whether any product is needed, identifying people who need to work on some of the tasks, identifying roadblocks, etc.

I am sure still it’s confusing so let’s try to understand from a real life example. Let’s assume there are few guests coming to your home for dinner and you are planning for it. Generally you will go about it as mentioned below [this is not exhaustive list] :

• Identify the occasion. Say – get-together, birthday party, anniversary, etc.

• Prepare list of invitees.

• Identify the category: veg and non veg.

• Prepare menu. [You may choose to ask some of the guests too depending on the situation and your relationship with them]

• Assess your budget and basis that revisit menu.

• Finalize menu

• Decide on order from outside, cook yourself or hire a cook.

• Assess if any decoration is needed and put together a plan for decoration.

• Mentally put a target for: ordering food/ food items, shopping, having dinner ready, dinner start and end time.

• Asking guests how did they like the food.

Now in this example, Guests are our customers, the menu which we prepared is the requirement, cooked food for dinner is the product and managing and executing above step falls under product management. Cooking and preparing of food is a kind of technical task and you have to rely on chef to deliver the same quality as you want in the menu. In case you are choosing to cook yourself then you are playing a role of engineer as well here. Putting an end to end plan, timelines, what all material is needed, from where it will be sourced, keeping a continuous check with the chef and other parties falls under program management.

In this example it doesn’t matter if one person is doing all the activities or many people are executing these steps. Ultimately all the steps of program management, product management and engineering is being executed to satisfy the customer need [which is the ultimate objective]. Here “delivering quality food as per customer’s preference” was the product deliverable whereas the program objective can be defined as: “Ensuring that foods are ready to serve by 9 PM by keeping the food wastage less than 1% and overall spent under $xx.”

Now with these focus area product manager will work towards everything that is needed to deliver the food as per customer’s choice and program manager will put together a plan for execution and work with other folks to ensure that the wastage is lesser than 1%, food is ready to serve (food is cooked and all arrangement for serving is done) by 9 PM and overall cost is under $xx. It also may happen that there are some areas/ tasks which is common between program and product manager. Like – raw material purchase process (where, how and when) because this is needed to meet program and product objective both. How, where and when raw materials are purchased can impact quality of food (which is product goal), it’s readiness by 9 PM & overall cost (which is program objective). So, product and program manager both have to sit, discuss and align on this task and jointly own the execution.

||एकायन|| worldly wisdom ||

Without going into the complexity of these terminologies and understanding theoretical definitions I take a simple, yet different approach. I assess:

• Who is my end customer?

• What painpoint I am solving & how?

• Is it the right priority?

• Apart from customer satisfaction do I have any other internal goal to achieve?
  And basis these I put together a plan and work with stakeholders to align on it and agree on the task ownership. It helps in following way:

• a) Customer first approach

• b) Once you wear a hat of a certain responsibility (Product Manager, Program Manager, Engineering Manager, Finance Manager, etc.) there are chances that you miss on some of the critical tasks/ steps/ risks. Even in this approach it may happen that since you are not the expert of all areas you can miss some of the tasks. But because you are looking at the larger picture and not wearing any hats, you will ask the right questions/ gather information from other stakeholders to ensure all areas are covered in the plan.

• c) Avoiding conflict in the area of ownership.

• d) Early awareness of risks/ unknowns. Or at least knowing that there are some unknowns which may be known at later stage.

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