# Introduction
# About this guide
Product Managers work on a cross-section of many disciplines. Hence, they need to possess various skills and competencies from various areas. We decided to split these competencies into 4 main categories:
The job of a Product Manager is much more complicated than the mentioned above 4 categories, but they should give us some structure and help us to allocate the knowledge more or less evenly.
Depending on the company a PM needs to develop different skills and perform different actions
We don't think that all PMs need to know all of these things by heart. You have to navigate through these guide and pick the areas that are most relevant to what you do, or planning to do
It's a good idea to ask a 3rd person to get some feedback for your own competencies model. It could be your direct manager, a colleague of yours or even a community of PMs that you can find our Telegram channel (opens new window)
Use this roadmap not only on yourself but see if you can help other PMs in your company. Hence you will share a common lingo and will define more granularly the area of responsibility of each other
This is work in progress. We all will be very happy if you find some time to participate in the project. If you are ready to help and happy to share your experience, check out this Quick start page. Also, feel free to add Issue into the repo itself or submit your PRs. We are waiting for any feedback in our Telegram channel (opens new window)
# Product Manager VS Project Manager
Very often people in the industry mix these two roles together or use them interchangeably. But is there a difference? We think, yes. Creating a product means raising and addressing these two questions:
- What exactly do we want to do?
- How are we going to achieve that?
A Product Manager job is to answer the first question, whereas a Project Manager addresses the second one.
| Product Manager: WHAT kind of a product it's | Project Manager: HOW are we going to create such product |
|---|---|
| Who is the main audience of the product and what problems will it solve? | Who do we need to build the product? |
| Why should it solve exactly these problems? How do we assemble the right team to build it? | How do we need to work to get the results? |
| How are these problems will be addressed by the product? | What do we need to do so these results are the right ones? |
| Are we sure it's really needed? And who exactly needs it the most? | How do we build the product with the budget we have? |
| How this product will be used? | etc. |
| etc. |
Few more thoughts:
- A Product Manager usually protects customers' interests, whereas a Project Managers takes the side of the people who create the product
- What we create and How we create it are tight together very closely and often bring up some conflicts
- It's better if these two hats are being worn by two different people. The success of the product relies on how these two people can collaborate together and help each other
- If one person wears both hats it's important to expose the conflict as early as possible and make sure that answers for the question What weren't dictated by the How and its answers