While recently interviewing for a similar position (Program Manager) at Microsoft, I told the interviewer that it's also important to get a feel of your competition 1 month/1year from the present by following the angel and VC investments. He got so turned off that I felt I just bombed the entire interview.

I always get lost on the difference between "program manager" and "product manager".

Is there a standard breakdown between these two?

For some reason I have the feeling that Microsoft popularized the usage of these titles - does anyone know firsthand if this trend started at Microsoft?

"program manager" title has a long of history, it existed way before Microsoft was around. In the 1st half of 20th century, the common use of the word "program" was to describe an allocation of resources like manpower, production capacity, equipment, typically in the military setting. For example, the term "linear programming" as a mathematical optimization technique is based on using "programming" in the sense of allocating resources.

So historically, program managers handled decisions about how to allocate resources to accomplish a mission. These days, program managers usually allocate resources over a portfolio of projects and decide whether projects are helping to achieve the program's mission.

Product manager has a responsibility for one or more products and associated strategic and executive decisions , around business plan, marketing, sales, research and development.

Wouldn't development managers and developers resent having program managers around telling them what should be built?

Well, no. If you're a developer or development manager working 70-90 hours a week developing and/or managing other developers, when do you have time to evaluate the market, keep track of every single competitor and potential competitor?

Do you run a spreadsheet loaded up with market data and demographics evaluating the potential revenue impact for all of the features you're thinking of including in the next release?

And so on and so forth. Product management is a full-time job on a substantial product. It may be that in small start-ups people wear many hats and you don't need it as a separate function. But if your team ever gets to the point that you can justify a full-time development manager, your team probably needs someone else with nearly full-time product management responsibility.

In addition to that, there are sometimes some benefits to separating product management from development management. Sometimes. Being a little divorced from the product's inner workings can provide a certain useful perspective. Hopefully, the product manager isn't wedded to the feature that a developer just spent three weeks building and can jettison it to ship on time :-)

Product management (at least where I am) also does a fair bit of marketing work. They tend to shape the overall product, but all technical decisions are made by engineering, not marketing.

You are thinking of what's best for the company, not the developers. For some people, development is only rewarding if they determine what to build.

Yes, and those people are called hobbyists.

Even if you work for yourself, you decide which market to be in, and the market decides what you must build and when.

Sure. I don't have some belief that all developers are incapable of product management. The very best, IMO, have strength in understanding what and why as well as how. But I do have a belief that in some cases, there is value for everyone in having a team with specialized roles. For all products there is a need for product management. And for some product teams, there should be a specialized product manager leading product management.

Interestingly, the push to smaller start-ups and smaller teams does create more opportunities for developers to wear multiple hats. That's a good thing too.

Then they should work somewhere they can do that. Most likely that's a small company or a startup.

Actually, I was at Microsoft between '94 and '05 and that's close to what happened in many cases, but not because of a single program manager. (At least not in cases that I saw directly.) Rather, as the company grew, and more program managers and project managers were assigned to things, a lot of developers felt less in control of their work due to the collective influence of a non-programmer organization.

That kind of growth probably has to happen. To be fair, most all the program managers had engineering degrees, and some had been successful developers. The project managers came from a different track entirely, and I think that was a more challenging relationship for a lot of developers.

If they had a problem with that sort of thing, then they shouldn't have taken a job at Microsoft, or even a corporation of modest size. Division of labor, and all that.

Besides, for a great many developers, dealing with a PM is better than dealing directly with people in finance and marketing, or customers themselves.