MSFT Program Mgr = Google Product Mgr?
I’ve been going through some old threads on the Product Manager role and find it difficult to find distinctions between the two roles since everyone just writes PM. Is there a difference between the two? Do they have similar responsibilities? If yes to previous question: Why does it seem that a Program Mgr at MSFT has less avg TC than a Product Mgr at Google? Does Microsoft generally have Product Managers at all? (btw my team doesn’t have any) #pm #product #programmanager #productmanagermicrosoft
Microsoft's Program Managers is what other companies call Product Managers. Google's Product Managers is what other companies call Technical Product Managers (with some exceptions). Google generally pays more than MS, and TPMs are usually paid more than PMs.
HyYN27 is correct. I was surprised how little the Google PM’s focus on the business aspect. They are just one level up from developers. And Google (outside of core search and acquired teams) products suffer because of it.
So what is the equivalent position for a MSFT program manager to attempt to interview for within Google?
Microsoft TPM role is a combination of both program manager and product manager role in other companies. This is the case in Azure at least.
A program manager is very different from a Product Manager. A Program Manager should be abbreviated to Pgm and product manager should be abbreviated to pm. First, I should mention that Microsoft is the only company that uses the term program manager to refer to a product manager. In all other companies a PgM is a project manager across different projects (“programs”), so it’s an operations role. A product manager is part of the engineering team and handles product roadmaps, meeting business metrics, and ownership of the product backlog. It’s a user focused and strategic role and the artifact PMs are responsible for is the product increment at the end of the sprint and to what extend it meets the business metric it was built for.
That distinction (especially in the case of Microsoft) and explanation of roles helps me a lot in understanding the roles. Thanks for the detailed response 👍🏽