Who Should A Team Include?

Q: Should a product team have both a project manager and product manager?

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It's certainly not a common configuration in product teams to have a separate project manager (not to be confused with a technical product manager or product owner).

For startups, cost is the primary concern as they tend to be lean and will happily bundle this job to be led by a product manager, owner or tech team lead.

Having said that, a project manager can make sense in certain scenarios. I can talk about a short stint at Simplicant where a Project Manager was afforded to me.

Note, in this case, the engineers on the team were dedicated but I was being shared across products.

The Project Manager helped me:

• Establish predictability of delivery
• Manage resource allocation & availability
• Streamline QA processes
• Maintain risk registers
• Push back when goal posts were shifting too frequently or weren't clear

The setup relieved me from dealing with daily mechanics of project management and driving engineering.

It also has to be said that not every Product Manager aces the project management aspect of their role. There's no shame in admitting that.

I know it was my least favorite part of the job as I was more inclined towards understanding customer problems and designing solutions.

Therefore, IMHO, a technical project manager can make sense if:

• There are multiple products & engineering sub-teams in play. It can get pretty taxing for a Product Manager to guardrail "delivery-on-time" in that setup
• The management is obsessed over timelines due to criticality of the domain (e.g. a government product that needs to launch before an election). In such scenarios, a Project Manager can aid help in marrying scope with delivery time
• Either the engineering resources are shared or the product manager is shared. (scenarios where multiple products compete for attention)

On the other hand, the Project Manager role can be an overkill, especially when experimental velocity is key.

Product teams, when searching for product market fit, thrive when they are nimble & can adapt rapidly to changes.

Sure, this doesn't give the license for product folks to go all over the place, but constant friction from a project manager can be counter-productive.

Resistance to real-time changes & dense release processes can come in the way to iterate quickly.

Overall, I wouldn't classify project managers as an essential role in a product team but they can add value when deployed to take off overheads from a product manager once the product scales beyond a certain point.