Do product people need project managers?

I ran an interesting poll on Twitter recently asking for product managers’ opinions of project managers, and whether they want to work with them. Project managers get a bit of a rough ride in product management circles and much of the classic literature, but what did people really think? I was pretty surprised.

What the..!?

I was surprised because nearly 60% of people seem to want to work with project management in their product development process. That’s not a slight on project managers from me… I have worked with some fantastic project managers in my time! However, it does run counter to the traditional product management narrative.

Some of the replies to the poll were interesting and made me think a little bit about the role of project management in product development, where project managers can deliver value, and the types of project managers that we might work with. I broke them down into four main groups (I’m sure there are more) in order of desirability:

The emergency Scrum masters

This is an interesting one that you might see in a company that is digitally transforming or moving from a professional service to a product mindset. That’s a good transformation to undergo, but we all know it’s not just a case of splitting your waterfalls into 2-week chunks and…