How to transition from Project Manager to Product Manager

Maximize your skills, focus on your skills gaps, and get your dream role

By Robert DruryPublished 4 years ago • 3 min read

Product Management Festival Trends & Benchmark Report 2019

In their 2019 trends survey, the Product Management Festival found the range of different roles that product managers were in BEFORE they started in product management, and the list is quite long (see image above).

In their study, the transition from Project Manager to Product Manager was the most frequently followed career path. I’m one of the ones who had been a project manager in a previous life, although not directly before my first product management role.

Why do project managers become product managers?

There are two main reasons that there are considerable numbers of project managers who make the transition into product management:

Proximity to product roles
Shared skills

What skills do project managers bring to product management?

When it comes to shared skills across roles, the following are perhaps most relevant:

Organized - project managers spend their time organizing others, getting updates on progress, assessing work done and work to be done, and determining what's required to get something over the line
Process driven - In order to be organized, project people have a process, as it supports gathering and assessing the information needed to make decisions.
Logical - projects have dependencies, they have sequences of actions and decisions, and being able to think through the consequences of one action on another is key to success
Good with documentation - gantt charts, project initiation documents, specifications all fall within the remit of project managers and are cousins of roadmaps, backlogs and user stories
Experienced with stakeholder engagement - by definition, a project manager is managing the activities within a defined workstream, including the people within it. They're responsible to stakeholders who initiated the project and need to understand goals and manage expectations.
Can handle prioritization - projects can be large, complicated beasts, with many concurrent actions, so having the skills of where to focus attention is key to making progress
Good communicator and team player - for a project manager, the project is the deliverable and they will make sacrifices to achieve that goal. From calling round participants to get updates, to working late into the night to update project timescales, they'll do so without drama and considering those in the team.
Good at managing scope creep - at least the good ones are. They can understand the difference between must have, should have, and could have, and the impact that each individual decision can have on the end result

What skills gaps might a project manager have?

Of course, being in a different type of role doesn’t expose you to the full range of skills that are required when you’re in an alternative position, and the following are the most typical skills gaps for project managers:

Finding creative solutions to problems
Focusing on the customer and not the delivery
Delegation of delivery to others
Thinking strategically rather than operationally
Being research and data driven
Being able to drop plans and respond to new inputs
Making decisions and not just managing them

How to fill a skills gap

When it comes to findings ways to fill skills gaps, there are a few areas in which project managers can work to gather the necessary expertise, including:

Taking on a support role — which will allow a closer proximity to the user and the needs of the business
Work alongside a product manager — which will expose them to decision making and more strategic thinking
Start looking at existing projects with a more data driven approach — which will start improving analytical skills and focusing on data driven decision making

For many of these steps, the important thing is to speak to others in the business and find opportunities to help them and gain the experience needed to fill the gap.

Talk to the existing product management team and, of course, your line manager, to find the moments to pick up new skills that will count towards your future product role.