Project Management Isn’t Product Management

Learn the key differences between product management and project management. Discover why product managers are essential for long-term product success.

Let’s face it: product management and project management are often mistaken for one another. But if you want your business to thrive and scale, it’s time to distinguish between the two—to shift from project thinking to product thinking.

Projects End. Products Don’t.

Imagine you’re building a house. Sounds like a project, right? Well, you’re not wrong. But here's where the analogy goes a little deeper than just “build it and forget it.” Sure, someone designs the house, sources the materials, and builds the thing, but that’s not the end. Once you move in, there's continual maintenance and improvements. There's planting flowers, mowing the yard, weeding around the mailbox, repairing a leaky faucet, upgrading the carpets. Maybe you remodel the kitchen, turn the guest room into a home office, or finally put in that firepit you’ve been talking about for years.

Owning a house never really "ends" until you sell it and move away.

That’s what product management is like. You don’t just build a product and move on. Products require constant attention, enhancements, and updates. Products evolve over time, meeting new needs, fixing new problems, and, yes, upgrading again and again to stay relevant. Until it's time to "move away" or retire the product.

Treat your product like a house you plan to live in, not flip. Because the moment you treat it like a one-and-done project, you’ve already started the path to it falling into disrepair.

Building and Rebuilding

Let’s take a tool like Salesforce. You bring in the project managers to define the project, get the buy-in, determine the requirements, implement the features, and roll it out to your team. Everything’s done, right? So you disband your project team.

Except—bam!—as soon as the initial rollout is done, users are bombarding you with enhancement requests: “I need new fields!” “Can you customize this report?” “How do we integrate this with that system?”

Now you need to assemble a new team. Maybe you can get some of those from the implementation team but maybe not. This is where the project management mindset trips you up. Teams are assembled for one-off projects and then dissolved, only to be rebuilt again for each new round of requests. It’s an endless cycle that wastes time and resources.

Product Management for the Long-Term

Here’s where things start to look different. Product managers aren’t just there for the one-time build. They’re there for the long haul. They help you decide which projects to tackle in the first place—and which to put on the backburner. They focus on the customer, aligning everything with their needs, not just the technical specs.

Think of development like a coffee shop at the airport. You’ve got a steady stream of customers (users), and your staff (developers) is spread thin across a hundred orders. Prioritization is key. You can’t just serve everyone all at once. And here’s the kicker: when someone says, “My project is the only one I care about,” they’re missing the bigger picture. You don’t have the luxury of unlimited resources, and developers are juggling dozens of projects.

Why Product Managers Matter

You need product managers to help navigate that reality. They are the ones who represent the business, the customer, and the market. They prioritize which projects to pursue and guide the technical team by helping them understand the customers and their problems. Product managers are not just liaisons between departments—they’re the architects of product success, from development to delivery. They’re business leaders and customer advocates.

At Product Growth Leaders, we use the Quartz Open Framework to address these very challenges. It’s a holistic way of thinking about product management, offering a six-step process that keeps products on track from idea to market.

Here’s a breakdown of the six stages:

1. Define: Identify the problems you’re solving. Not just any problem—the problem.

2. Commit: Get the necessary resources (people, time, money) aligned to make this happen.

3. Describe: Use stories to flesh out those problems—because it’s not just about the specs, it’s about the people behind them.

4. Create: Build solutions that actually solve the problem—and delight your users.

5. Prepare: Get your go-to-market teams aligned and ready. This is the product launch phase.

6. Deliver: And, don’t forget, you have to deliver it to customers and start planning new capabilities based on their feedback.

But here’s the thing: these steps aren’t linear. Quartz is iterative. The learning at each stage feeds into the next and sometimes loops back to the previous one. In short, things evolve, and your product strategy needs to adapt too.

Stop Thinking in Projects. Start Thinking in Products.

In the fast-paced, ever-changing world of tech-enabled businesses, you can’t afford to treat product management like a series of one-off projects. You need product managers to be the long-term navigators, keeping the ship on course, making strategic calls, and ensuring that your product continually meets the evolving needs of your customers.

So, next time someone says, “This is just a project,” remind them: Projects end. Products don’t.

If you want your product to succeed in the long term, you need more than just project managers. You need product managers who guide the product through the whole product lifecycle, ensuring it keeps getting better and better, long after the initial launch.

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Download our free ebook, How to Achieve Product Success to learn more about being systematic about discovering, developing, and delivering products.