It is amazing how some questions never get old. Back in 2015 when I was still early in my product manager career, I was always asking myself this question and I came across this questionnaire to help me understand if I was doing tasks of one role or the other. I still have the spreadsheet, but I did not keep the source so would not be able to quoted.
Anyhow, what I concluded back in the day was that, while I was mainly doing product manager work I could benefit from having some project manager skills. I have never had the luxury of working with a project manager side-by-side but I can see where some of the tension in product managers come who have to figure value with constraints. It is like being asked to be the cook and waitress at the same time. It can get out of hand.
While I agree with the general idea of your article, there is one point I disagree with: functions and roles are constructs that we use to make sense of the world. They do not define whether a person can or cannot perform them. It is the other way around: a persons ability, skills define whether they can perform a role or task. By that I mean that a project manager can perfectly be a product person and vice versa. And that any role can cease to exist and a company will still be successful if you decide to call your team roles: "Lead clown", "technical clown", "boss clown"... the important thing is whether the clowns in questions will do the job that needs to get done: Understand the business finances, the customer needs and the price they are willing to pay for it, the skills in the team to give them customers what they want, and the magical overlap of those things. So I do believe the tasks can be replaced. Some companies do it. I don't think there are rules written in stone for what roles a company needs. They need to define how they work, as long as it works for them.
And I completely agree with what you are disagreeing with (if I understand you correctly that is). Functions and roles are absolutely only concepts to make sense of the world and I also believe that people are so much more than their roles and that they are often more capable than their roles require of them.
Why I raised this topic is that I keep seeing mismatches in the expectations the companies have and the competencies of the employees simply because hiring managers don't understand what is needed to succeed in the role and what each of those functions actually entails. Slapping the title "Product Manager" on a person who who has no strategic say in the life cycle of any product does not mean that the company is now a Product company. I sadly see this often though.
That said I would actually love the thought of hiring managers / companies making an effort to truly understand what the person in the role needs to be able to do to be successful and just naming the role "Boss clown" or the "Queen of frikkin' everything" - as long as there clarity in expectations from both sides. Much better than the current PjM and PM.
It is amazing how some questions never get old. Back in 2015 when I was still early in my product manager career, I was always asking myself this question and I came across this questionnaire to help me understand if I was doing tasks of one role or the other. I still have the spreadsheet, but I did not keep the source so would not be able to quoted.
Anyhow, what I concluded back in the day was that, while I was mainly doing product manager work I could benefit from having some project manager skills. I have never had the luxury of working with a project manager side-by-side but I can see where some of the tension in product managers come who have to figure value with constraints. It is like being asked to be the cook and waitress at the same time. It can get out of hand.
While I agree with the general idea of your article, there is one point I disagree with: functions and roles are constructs that we use to make sense of the world. They do not define whether a person can or cannot perform them. It is the other way around: a persons ability, skills define whether they can perform a role or task. By that I mean that a project manager can perfectly be a product person and vice versa. And that any role can cease to exist and a company will still be successful if you decide to call your team roles: "Lead clown", "technical clown", "boss clown"... the important thing is whether the clowns in questions will do the job that needs to get done: Understand the business finances, the customer needs and the price they are willing to pay for it, the skills in the team to give them customers what they want, and the magical overlap of those things. So I do believe the tasks can be replaced. Some companies do it. I don't think there are rules written in stone for what roles a company needs. They need to define how they work, as long as it works for them.
And I completely agree with what you are disagreeing with (if I understand you correctly that is). Functions and roles are absolutely only concepts to make sense of the world and I also believe that people are so much more than their roles and that they are often more capable than their roles require of them.
Why I raised this topic is that I keep seeing mismatches in the expectations the companies have and the competencies of the employees simply because hiring managers don't understand what is needed to succeed in the role and what each of those functions actually entails. Slapping the title "Product Manager" on a person who who has no strategic say in the life cycle of any product does not mean that the company is now a Product company. I sadly see this often though.
That said I would actually love the thought of hiring managers / companies making an effort to truly understand what the person in the role needs to be able to do to be successful and just naming the role "Boss clown" or the "Queen of frikkin' everything" - as long as there clarity in expectations from both sides. Much better than the current PjM and PM.