Product Manager vs. Software Engineer

Product Manager vs. Software Engineer — What Is the Difference?

While product management and software engineering may seem similar, there are fundamental differences in what they actually involve. Here, we’ll examine a product manager vs. a software engineer, comparing their functions, roles, and responsibilities.

Overall, product managers work with many different teams, helping to align various stakeholders and user needs. In contrast, software engineers tend to work mainly with their own team, programming, testing, and coming up with robust solutions and code for a particular product their team has been asked to build.

What does a product manager do?

Product management is an essential process that occurs throughout the entire product life cycle, from ideation to testing to launch. Product managers help to ensure that your organization is producing products that satisfy your customers’ needs and are reactive to market changes and trends. This is a people-facing role that ensures cohesiveness and alignment between departments with a new product release.

Product managers work with various stakeholders such as design, engineering, sales, legal, marketing, and business development to ensure that products meet their requirements.

While executing product management, they may write product specifications, work with engineers and designers who will build features, share and act on user feedback with the team, and manage the launch process. They will also be responsible for deciding on the trade-offs if there are any problems during a product’s testing stages. They will also put together a detailed product roadmap to manage each of these processes.

What does a software engineer do?

Software engineers, on the other hand, tend to deal with software project management and the nuts and bolts of actually producing these new products or features. They will mostly work with other engineers, writing, debugging, and shipping code. They will design solutions for problems they encounter and review their teams’ code for possible improvements or potential issues.

This is less of a people-facing role, and they tend to spend their time ‘heads down’ programming rather than in meetings or answering emails. Software engineers tend to have a more technical role than product engineers, who may be more focused on alignment and strategy than the finer details of building code for a new product, feature, or release.

As software engineers, they may be working on a user-facing product or building or improving the backend infrastructure that other products rely on. Software engineers are responsible for ensuring the quality, scalability, and reliability of their code and may be asked to gather best-practice programming for their team for future projects.

Anna Grigoryan

Anna is a Director of Product Management at Wrike and a seasoned product leader with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry. She has successfully led multiple engineering teams, ensuring the delivery of high-quality products featuring mobile and web experiences, seamless integrations with other platforms, and innovative white-labeled solutions.