Product Experience ≠ Project Experience
Not all experience is created equal.
Some Background
Like many of my Arc articles, this one was yet again inspired by a community convo.
It started with a job post that required ‘Product’ focused experience and ended with a short discussion on what it means to have ‘Product Experience’ vs ‘Project Experience’.
What is product experience anyway? Why does it matter? And why does that one phrase- “needs product experience” - seem to invalidate so much of what most developers in Pakistan have actually done?
See, in most markets, this nuance might not matter much. Experience is experience, right?
But here? In Pakistan? Where software exports are dominated by service delivery shops, and agency models keep the wheels spinning, the difference between project experience and product experience is real.
Most developers here are trained to build something from scratch, hand it off, and jump to the next thing. Ship fast. Move on. That’s the game. The product, once delivered, becomes someone else’s problem.
But product work? It’s the opposite. It’s about sticking around. Watching it grow. Breaking it. Fixing it. Shipping new things on top of old messes. Working with constraints you can’t sprint your way out of. And learning to stay accountable not just for features - but for outcomes.
And that difference shapes how you think. How you build. How you lead.
The Brutal Gap in Pakistan’s Dev Ecosystem
Let’s name it plainly:
“In Pakistan, most folks don’t have product experience. Just agency experience.”
It’s not a judgment. It’s a reality of the market.
There aren’t many homegrown product companies with mature teams, live-user bases, and the kind of mentorship that grows builders into owners.
The result?
Brilliant devs who’ve only worked on short-term projects
High output, low accountability cycles
A generation of tech talent that’s dangerously close to being over-credentialed and under-prepared
But that’s changing. Slowly.
Thanks to remote work and global hiring, more devs here are getting real product exposure.
You don’t need to move to San Francisco. You just need to work on something that stays alive long enough to teach you.
Why Product Experience Hits Different
Most developers have built something. Fewer have stuck around long enough to see it bend, break, and get rebuilt.
If you’ve never stayed with a product after it’s been launched, there’s an entire category of problems you simply haven’t faced.
You haven’t seen your system buckle under real user load. You haven’t scrambled during a CEO demo because a live bug chose the worst possible moment to appear. You haven’t had to make sense of three conflicting feature requests - all backed by valid business logic - and still ship something that works.
You probably haven’t watched usage tank after what looked like a simple UI tweak. Or traced a minor security oversight back to sprint #2, when the team just wanted to hit the deadline.
This isn’t a skill gap. It’s an exposure gap.
Agencies train you to move fast. They sharpen your ability to juggle multiple tech stacks and get things out the door. That’s valuable.
But if you haven’t lived through the aftermath of launch - if you haven’t managed the chaos of real users with real expectations - you’re still outside the furnace.
And product thinking? That’s forged in fire.
My Own Shift: From Product-Labeled to Product-Led
The reason I work as a freelance product consultant?
There were no real product roles here.
Most “Product Manager” listings in Pakistan are just project manager roles with a different badge - Excel documenting, ticket assigning, timeline chasing. No user insight. No iteration loops. No strategy.
So I had to pivot.
I dropped the chase for local titles and switched to remote freelance work with startups abroad - just to actually do product work. Just to close the gap between what I knew I could do and what the local market was offering.
And it worked.
Not because I was smarter. But because I stopped waiting for the market to catch up - and found a model that respected the skillset I wanted to grow.
The Pros and Cons However
Even though I believe Product experience is more valuable, if I didn’t work on Projects, I wouldn’t be where I am.
When I talk to folks abroad who don’t have a lot of execution experience, I see the gaps for what they are. I see the pros and cons, and I see both sides.
But that being said, if you were to make the jump from working on Projects to working on Products - here’s what you need to expect:
Product Roles: What You Gain
Long-term ownership → You maintain what you build, see real-world impact, and grow architectural thinking.
Deeper technical depth → You stay in the same stack long enough to learn why things break (and how to prevent it).
Real user feedback → You don’t guess - analytics and retention trends tell you what’s working.
Credibility → Startups and FAANG-like companies prefer this. They assume it trains you in scale, stability, and product sense.
Product Roles: What You Lose
Slower tech exposure → You might work with the same tools for years.
More meetings, more politics → Especially in growing teams.
Harder to switch domains → Depth comes at the cost of versatility.
You’re responsible when stuff breaks → Not everyone wants to be on-call for 2AM crashes.
Project/Agency Roles: What You Gain
Speed and breadth → You see multiple stacks, multiple business models, and rapid timelines.
Client empathy → You build exactly what someone wants - fast.
Tighter deadlines = better hustle → You get good at estimating time, communicating scope, and shipping under pressure.
Great for early-career devs → You learn how to work with chaos.
Project/Agency Roles: What You Lose
Shallow feedback loops → The project is gone once it’s delivered. No maintenance, no iteration.
Code dies after demo day → A lot of effort ends up unused or rewritten.
Low engineering investment → Tight budgets mean CI/CD, testing, and devops often get skipped.
You’re seen as “just a coder” → Business decisions rarely loop you in.
What Makes Product Work So Much Harder (and usually Better)
“It’s not about making it work. It’s about making it last.”
That means:
Writing code you’ll revisit in 9 months
Balancing performance with scalability
Thinking beyond just "does it run" to "how will it break"
Building systems with readability, not just cleverness
Designing with maintenance, not just milestones, in mind
You’re no longer just building features.
You’re making tradeoffs. You’re managing complexity. You’re supporting business logic. You’re co-owning a living organism with users who don’t care how beautiful the codebase is - as long as it works.
Don’t fall in the I will ‘learn it’ myself trap
There’s a subtle trap that catches a lot of early-career devs. They think that if they just ‘learn’ about what it means to be working in a Product ecosystem, they can just hack their way through it.
You start reading more. Watching talks. Quoting frameworks. Suddenly you’re fluent in terms like “agile,” “MVP,” “feedback loops,” and “design debt.” It feels like understanding.
But there’s a difference between knowing the vocabulary and having the scars.
You can talk about sprints, but until you’ve watched a release get pushed back three times because no one accounted for legacy code - you haven’t lived agile.
You can recite best practices, but you haven’t really understood them until you’re digging through logs at midnight trying to find what broke in production.
That difference matters.
And here’s the thing: nobody expects juniors to know everything. You’re allowed to be new. What stunts your growth isn’t inexperience.
It’s acting like you’ve already arrived.
Real judgment comes later. When the abstractions fade. When the consequences show up. When you stop quoting articles and start remembering what it felt like when things went wrong.
So read the books. But don’t mistake them for battle. That part still lies ahead.
So What Actually Counts as Product Experience?
It’s not the job title. It’s definitely not the company logo.
Product experience is about context. It’s about the kind of problems you’ve been exposed to - and the consequences that followed.
If you’ve seen your work affect real people, not just a QA checklist - you're on the path. If you’ve made changes based on how users actually behave, not what a spec document guessed they would do - you’re getting there. If you’ve learned to think beyond short sprints and considered what your code looks like a year later, that’s product thinking.
Maybe you’ve worked with design and support and sales. Maybe you’ve had to defend a feature tradeoff to a frustrated stakeholder. Or maybe you’ve just sat with the discomfort of a messy decision, knowing there’s no clean answer; just a better-informed guess.
If you’ve lived any of that - even once - you’ve earned more than a line on your resume. You’ve earned a new lens.
And if not? No shame in it. You’ll get there.
Just don’t confuse shipping a project with owning a product. They are different muscles entirely.
Projects Show Skill. Products Build Instinct.
Let’s be clear - this isn’t an attack on agency devs.
Agencies make you fast. They make you flexible. They throw you into chaos and expect you to ship anyway. That’s a valuable kind of grit.
But working on a real product, over time, shapes something deeper.
Instinct
Instinct is what tells you when to refactor and when to leave it alone. It’s what guides you when metrics clash with vision. It’s what anchors you when someone says, “just ship it,” and you know it’ll cost more later.
Instinct takes time. It comes from watching things break, learning why, and choosing what matters most.
One Last Thing
This is a journey.
Skipping straight to product roles isn’t always the answer - especially here. In Pakistan’s current market, starting in project-based roles often is the most practical way in. You learn to move fast. You wear multiple hats. You touch more codebases in a year than some devs do in five. That’s real experience.
The key is to not stop there.
The best developers I’ve seen didn’t just choose product over project - or vice versa. They did both. They stacked speed with depth. Breadth with ownership. They understood what it means to ship and what it means to stay.
That mix is hard to find. But if you build it, you’ll be hard to ignore.
This piece isn’t here to tell you which path to pick. It’s just here to tell you they’re not the same.
And if you know the difference, you’re already ahead.
If you’re navigating that shift - from projects to products, from sprint speed to long-haul thinking - I hope this gave you some clarity.
It’s not a race. It’s not a ranking. It’s just a different kind of weight. One you grow into, one mistake, one late-night debug, one user insight at a time.
And if you ever need help finding your footing?
I’m around.
With or without my help – I wish you the best.
The Wandering Pro is a quiet corner of the internet where freelancers, tech workers, and first-time builders gather to make steady progress - one challenge, one win, one project at a time.
Join The Wandering Pro; find your rhythm, share progress, and grow with a community backed by decades of real-world building experience.