 Product manager, program manager, and project manager all sounds very similar because they're all PMs. However, there's huge differences between their roles and responsibilities within different companies. So for you, if you're new into the product management space, you might be quite confused regarding what type of roles should I choose. In this video, I'm going to share with you the differences between product, program, and project managers in different big tech companies so that it's easy for you to decide what type of career path is more suitable for you. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nia Sidi, the founder, product manager, accelerator from DrNiaSidi.com. I help people transition from worker B to a product manager and business leader. If you want to learn the most effective way to become a product manager, please make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit the bell button so you'll be notified every time I post a new video every Wednesday. I have a lot of students inside the PM accelerator and learning their dream job offer within fan companies and non-fan companies. And today, I'm going to give you specific examples what it looks like if you work for Meta as a product manager versus program manager. And what two different students learn in two different roles so that you know behind-the-scenes stories, what the difference is, and you learn the real-life stories. Difference number one is a relationship to the product organization. Product managers are the CEO of product. Program and project managers, they are the COO of product. So the first one is about what, the second one is about how. The first one is about the vision, the second one is about execution. The first one is about external, the second one is about internal. For example, product managers are frequently looking at long-term roadmap or short-term roadmap. They're setting up the vision of the product. However, project or program managers are thinking about how can they work in a cross-functional team to get some more execution. So they are the COO of the product. And frequently, product managers, we frequently work with external stakeholders to understand the needs and desire and requirements and pain points so that we can put them into requirements for our engineers to build. And we can also put them onto a short-term and long-term roadmap for the organization to work on it together. Now, on the other hand, the program and project managers, they mainly focus on how exactly they need to execute and lead the team to build the product together. So they're mainly working with internal stakeholders in a very large cross-functional team. So both roles are extremely related and both roles are very important. I made a separate video showing you the career path of product manager in the organization. You guys can go into the details to take a look how product manager can rise to the CEO of the whole company. The second difference is the roles and responsibilities. For example, my student working for Meta and recently he landed Meta L7 offer. What his roles and responsibilities is more towards set up the roadmap. For example, his responsibilities in Meta include the following, talking to customers to identify their pain points and problems so that they can start to write a requirement and communicate with engineering teams and identify the product vision and identify the business opportunities and define the go-to-market strategy of the entire product. He also needs to learn how to create a roadmap and identify features and he also needs to learn how to prioritize features and prioritize the development Jira ticket for the engineering teams. I also have another student who joined Meta as a technical program manager. What he stayed today looked like is that he needs to work on this golden iron triangle which are the scope, resources and schedule deadline. Specifically every day he's thinking about how can he work with product team engineers and all very big cross-functional teams to understand and manage the scope of the product and how can they make sure all the team are working together so that they are not going to slip the deadline and does he need to gain more responsibilities and more resources within the organization so that he can ensure that the golden iron triangle is very well balanced. On top of that he also needs to spend lots of time understanding the risk within the organizations of the business risk, engineering risk and schedule risk and how to mitigate all the risk and he spent lots of time talking cross-functionally to align the expectations within different stakeholders so both product and program managers need to know how to influence without authorities. I made a different video talks in depth about product manager and product owner you can check out more information over there. And now let's also talk more about program and project manager differences specifically for program manager and they are working more in a bigger larger scope project managers are working for one specific project or product so program manager usually can see multiple project in the portfolio and project managers might report the progress of individual product or project to the program manager I'm going to make a separate video talk about those two differences in detail so that you know which one you can pick as well. Now answer me this question. Do you want to become a product manager or program manager? So comment down below. The third differences between product manager and program manager is the side rate differences. If you look at public information online you can see that product manager is getting paid about 20% higher than a project manager or program manager. So therefore it's totally up to you what directions you want to pick and I wouldn't think this 20% is a huge differences because if you join a fan company as a program manager you might still get paid higher compared with startups, product manager. So based on the information I provided, I hope by now you're able to identify which career fabs you should choose and maybe your interest in both. If you have decided you want to become a product manager I want to go to this website to download this link where you can use this a product manager, a key product manager template that has been used by 4,000 product managers so that you can use the same methodology to learn your dream product manager job offer as well. If you like any of the free content I shared with you today please make sure to hit the like button and share the video with any aspiring product managers. This is Dr. Nancy Lee. I'm going to see you next time. Bye.