Product VS project: differences in approaches

Online Factory5 is a Russian developer of analytical solutions for business based on smart data processing algorithms. We in the company have experience of bringing together two different teams, and we would like to share it. On the one hand, we are developing our product, which is actively distributed through the partner network. And there is a team that deals with this - the grocery one. On the other hand, we are doing commercial development. And for this, there is also a team - a project team.

And here and there developers, testers, devops, analysts, managers. They exchange knowledge, imbue each other with ideas. The product team can transfer the project to the project team for testing technological and product hypotheses, and the project team can add the project result as a technology into the product. Both things happen quite legally, but people from one team to another never move. Since there is a big difference between them. It lies in work processes, structure, goal-setting, and even the profile of new candidates. It can be difficult to explain to those who are not immersed, but we will try to disassemble everything.

Product and project - the main differences

Let's start with the basics of product and design development. Below is a comparison table that will help you identify important components of the approaches, for example, time intervals, sets of operations, team, and more.

Let's look at some examples:

Factory5 big data analytics platform built to drive business performance through analytics and data management is a product. And the creation of an algorithm for optimizing a production program, operating on this platform, for a specific client is a project.

A solution for monitoring operation and predicting the technical condition of equipment is a product, and implementing a tool for calculating the residual resource of a gas turbine unit for a specific client is a project.

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