What does a post-MBA product manager/project manager do? What’s the difference between them? What skills/attributes make one successful?

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OP, I’m moving into a Product Manager role so maybe I can help. First thing to note, though is that every company treats PdMs a tad differently. At Amazon, everyone and their mother is a PdM so your role and focus can be wildly different depending on the project or team. At Google the PdM model is so structured that you tend to only focus on the strategy side of PdM at higher levels.

But what is PdM vs PjM (project manager)? Product Managers can be thought of as the CEO of their product/domain. As a PdM, it’s your job to bring a product through the lifecycle. That means building a strategy based on goals passed down to your domain, researching and coming up with a vision for a product that fits into the strategy, designing the product, developing the product, testing it, launching it, and monitoring it to determine success and ways to improve. A Product Manager is in charge of maintaining the vision for the product and know when it’s time to move to the next stage of the product lifecycle. A Product Manager is also in charge of when to bring in others (UX/UI designers, Engineers/developers, data scientists, sales team, etc) to make sure the product is as successful as possible. And when any stakeholder is not present, it is the PdM’s responsibility to represent them at meetings. Product Managers will add and determine what stories are added to each team’s sprint.

A project manager, on the other hand, supports Product Managers by maintaining the stories and verifying that all teams are on track. They monitor the level of success of teams based on the number of points in a sprint so they can help the PdM determine a reasonable amount of work each sprint.

Hope this helps- happy to clarify or chat further!

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this is probably the best description I’ve seen !!!! Amazing job here

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Well product and or project manager. Hopefully you have thick skin. You’ll get pooped on by everyone. It takes a special breed to be a Project and or product manager. My best advice is to being successful is time management and being clear/transparent.

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Sorry but this is the most generalized advice I’ve seen in a while

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