Project management is the art of getting things done. Product management is deciding what to do in the first place—and also, as in the case of the benefit screeners, deciding what not to do. If you collect hundreds of formal requirements and just start building software for all of them, you’ve generated a whole lot of work for skilled and dedicated project managers, but you haven’t made any real choices. That’s how you end up with a 212-question SNAP application, or a website that works only on computers in your building, or a system so complex it takes seventeen years to learn.
