The difference between Product, Program and Project Management

What's the difference between Product, Program, Project, Technical Program Management? These titles are super confusing and way too similar. This video breaks down each role and helps to align your goals with the right title.

Table of Contents:
0:00 - Intro
0:17 - What different questions do they each ask?
0:40 - More about Program & Project Managers
2:00 - More about Product managers
3:30 - Who does what?
4:15 - Where do you fit based on your career goals?
7:10 - Jenny's Kitchen Analogy
8:10 - Thank you for watching

Please share, subscribe and whatever you can do so people stop paying for expensive courses online.

[liambolling]

Let's keep PM resources are free! Thank you all for the support

[kudabeen]

I have been resistent to Project Management and now finding more and more what I enjoy doing and have been doing fits more in Product Management...this was very helpful as I think about making a change. Very good explanation visuals.

[tashan]

Clearly articulated! In my personal eperience, I have also found that sometimes the lines blur. Depending on specific org practices and resourcing in place, Product Managers may be juggling both long-term strategies and tactical (i.e program-esque) tasks.

[blondieee]

I have been in sales for 9 years and always felt that something was missing in my role. Simply focusing on being a hunter & gatherer of leads and deals and working alone most of the time absolutely destroyed my happiness and fulfillment. Thank you so much Liam for outlining the differences and really pinpointing 'what is your ideal role based on the stuff you like to DO'.

My question is, given my sales experience, what is the best way to transition into Product Management? I think I would do very well in this role. Second question: how do you choose which product to get into?

Thank you very much for this video and in advance for any additional support/response to my questions.

[heir]

Point of clarification: In the analogy at the end. There would be a project manager for each unit in the kitchen (one for the table, one for the countertop one for the chairs, etc). The program manager is responsible for all the project managers and ensuring the kitchen as a product gets shipped on time.

[polares]

I've watched two videos so far and it's helping me get a lot of perspectives on why and how to get to Product Management, thanks man :)

[nainafavs]

Love the kitchen analogy! THANK YOU ❤️ after watching soooo many videos on YT, I finally understood the difference between all 3 PMs. Helps me a ton! Subscribed ☺️

[michellezhou]

Thank you for making these videos on product management, they’re very informative . I’ve learned a lot from your videos and posts on your website. I can’t wait to watch this!

[shaquannaanthony]

Thank you so much for providing this information.

[cmelanin]

This was great description of each one. Great job!!

[aniketpandey]

Hey Liam, Really great content
The way you've covered each points It's quite easy to understand for anyone. I really appreciate!

[raiden]

Thank you Liam! - Love your style bud ... appreciate your time and effort. I think you are doing a great job, explaining and educating, your style of explaining and educating strikes the right balance between education while keeping in audience engaging in a fun and interested way.

Hope your channel goes viral!

[kendallchristian]

I’m new to your channel, but I just lost want to say thank you for all of this information!!

[abduamir]

Thank you mate! You're doing really great job, very helpful!

[pranavpurankar]

Excellent liam, you covered everything in one video. Thank you for the efforts.

[xeniazeger]

Got the answer within the first 30 seconds. Thank you:)

[cocoarecords]

Probably the best video explaining the differences on the whole web

[samli]

Awesome content! Super easy to understand. For a person who is interested in product, problem solving and hands-on work, what's your suggestion? Like product manager specialised in analytics?

[adityak]

Hey Liam, how was your experience working as a Program Manager at MSFT and Product Manager at Google. I feel that these roles are so company specific and I have seen myself always doing product management/keeping product senses active when deciding what to build and why AND once that's aligned doing a lot of Program Management during execution of the idea against the roadmap and timeline, tracking metrics and again forming hypothesis to validate/invalidate and starting the cycle all over.

Would love to know how was your experience with these two roles.

PS: Many thanks for this great initiative. You are solving a great problem in getting more people familiar with this field. Appreciate it!

[annanabil]

Subscribed! This is only my 2nd video of yours that I've watched, and your delivery and genuine approach solidified it for me. I see myself (in a UX role) with potential advancement into Principal Designer and then UX Architect. I also believe that educational resources should be free and whenever I start my youtube channel, it would be ad-free and include free mentorship as well. In fact, the most UX-Mature companies will often provide free mentorship in-house, so why wouldn't we spread the wealth outside of our workplace? If I want UXD field to remain user-focused, then it only makes sense that I work in service of them and our industry.

Lately, I fear it's becoming too business-focused, since new UX designers are afraid of stepping on too many toes, rather than promoting user advocacy. It seems that the online UX community has been hijacked by bandwagoners who've poisoned the well. There's a lot of misleading info out there, so it's refreshing to have some advocates like yourself who embody best practices. I see so many YT channels exploiting UX's recent popularity, even though they are PMs or UI-Designers. They give a romanticized version of the job role, simply because it ensures more clicks and subscribers, and that only gets a lot of hopes up for newbies entering the field.

The internet was always originally intended to be a safe space that was free and available to us all, while tv and radio were commodified with ads and marketing. Then pop-up ads came along, and then spam/malware, and eventually data-collection followed that. Suddenly the internet no longer belonged to the people but was controlled by those with the most capital. YT also used to be free, with creators who uploaded videos for fun, before adpocalypse, affiliates, sponsors, and patreon saturated our screens. I digress, but I'm just saying it's best to support creators with buymeacoffee, venmo, zelle, ko-fi, mintme, tipeee, or coindrop. You should definitely leave us a link to tip you in some way, since your insights are invaluable!