Physical vs Digital Product Manager; what are the differences?

Question

I have two opportunities ahead in two different companies as a Product Manager, they're both equal, in a lot of aspects:

• Same Income
• Near my house
• Company Size (around 90 employees each)
• Both act in Life Sciences/Medical Products markets
• Similar culture, mission, values, etc...
• Enjoyable workplace

But, Company 1 develops Medical Software and Company 2 develops pharmaceuticals.

Both companies want me to manage a product from scratch, which means that Company 1 does not have a single line of code written, and Company 2 does not have a formula developed.

I am young (22 yrs/old) and in my career, I always worked for Physical Medical Products. I look forward to be a specialist in Healthcare/Life Sciences markets.

I'm struggling to identify which company should I make the decision to enter (I have ~3 days to give an answer).

What may I encounter differently as a Product Manager for a Digital Product vs a Physical Product?

Ps: I do not want this to be opinion-based (correct me if I'm wrong please) but I want practical clarifications on how these two kind of products may differ in my future workplace activities.

Answer 1

The main difference I see between the physical and digital products are in the execution approach/methods and in domain skills.

Having been managing product development (not in healthcare but in consumer products) I can say the product life cycle for both are almost the same. Both the products have to go through phases like conception, market validation, development,product validation, certification and market release.

What differs is the method. For example, methods taken for market validation for digital products can be questionnaire or beta software release. For physical products it can be prototypes or clinical trials. The execution approach can be agile with shorter release cycles for digital products. Whereas for physical products it can be a waterfall model with longer release cycles.Managing physical products requires a good understanding of the production process like raw material sourcing and processing, production steps and guidelines, packaging, logistics and distribution.

Both physical and digital product management can provide ample learning opportunities. Both can also make you a specialist in healthcare/life science market but under different fields. For example if you work with digital products you can be a specialist in healthcare software and services. So the choice depends on which healthcare field you would like to specialize and finally on what you enjoy.

Answer 2

DarkCygnus suggested I put this into an answer instead of just a comment.

So, expanding on my comment.

In the end, both of your proposed jobs are just that - jobs. The position title is dependent on the company. In my current position we have a 'Product Manager'. This company is in warehousing and distribution/logistics. My previous position was in clinical trials. They also had 'Product Manger'. The two industries could not be more different. Parts of these job were vastly different (domain knowledge) but parts were similar (budgeting, program management, etc.) (Of course, for us geeky developers the C# coding is very much the same).

Job titles are not that important as you go on in your career. When I used to hire developers, I really didn't look at the job title on a resume. in one company it could be 'Senior Application Engineer' while the other had 'Application Engineer 5'. I was not looking at the title. Instead I looked at the responsibilities, skills and what was accomplished.

You are young. I am impressed that you are asking these types of questions. You have time to chose a position - whichever one feels like the best fit. No one can answer what is best for you. You are just starting out. You will have many different jobs in your working life.

Best of luck!

Answer 3

You didn't mention the regulatory environments in your two opportunities. If one involves clinical trials or other extensive approval cycles and the other doesn't, that difference will be far more important to your day to day work than anything else.

I started in software in the days when we made physical products. We burned a CD-ROM, printed a little book, and put the whole lot in a nice box. Our product manager then ran around to distributors and retailers, trying to persuade them to order the product for resale. We had to make the software as close to perfect as possible, because updating it in the field was hard and expensive.

Now, digital products are much easier to update in the field. In fact, if the product is software-as-service, we can update it without the customers even knowing. So the job of the product manager is much more focused on prioritizing feature requests for rapid release. There's no focus at all on distributors and retail (except for really popular products like Turbotax and the like).

Modern digital products are now mostly sold by subscription, so a product manager's success is measured by new-customer acquisition and renewals (churn, it's sometimes called) rather than unit sales.

Physical products will have longer cycle times, and may not enjoy renewal revenue. Those factors will make your product-management job different from digital.

Whatever you do, go take a short course from an outfit called Pragmatic Marketing.

Answer 4

I would focus on the job requirements of the positions.

Basically, are you going to be expected to spend all day managing the knowledge workers, or will you be expected to spend part of your time to contribute to the product? How much domain knowledge is going to be expected? What project management methodologies are the two roles using? While the domain skills of programming and drug development aren’t really transferable, the management skills used to manage teams of them might be.