What is the difference between Hardware and Software Product Management Processes?

Product Management Process is responsible for definition, planning, design and implementation of all products in enterprise's portfolio. It manages products to required profit and loss margins, customer satisfaction and quality commitments, as well as delivering new products to the market.

So there is pretty much the same if we’re talking about generic obligations of these processes. It is obvious that both Hardware and Software companies tend to launch better products and gain more margins.

However, Product Management processes and Product Development process are two distinct process types.

Product Development is predominantly a project-oriented process that develops and delivers new products to customers.

And here we can see difference between Hardware and Software cases because of different nature of Product Development. I’ll try to show you exact difference.

The first difference is in Time-To-Market indicator.
Software Product Development process always delivers new Products faster to the market than a Hardware Product Development process.

The second is product roadmap and new feature requests.
We can easily upgrade Software Product by issuing new update, but it is impossible to update Hardware Product especially when we are talking about major upgrade. Thus, Hardware Product Manager should pay more attention at the beginning of a Product Lifecycle (at Gathering and Analyzing market requirements and Planning).

Now, let’s take a look at the difference between Software and Hardware Product Manager’s role.
Hardware equipment is pretty much the same across many vendors, because of highly standardized protocols used. The only difference is in how features are implemented and how much does they costs. So in most Hardware vendors Product Managers are only specification and presentation guys and their role in the Product Development Process tends to zero.
In Software vendors Product Managers are commonly playing the “embedded CEO of a Product” role.

Also if enterprise product portfolio consists of many products, Software Product Manager need to take care of cross-product integration and customization which is not the issue for the Hardware Product Manager.