Product Owner vs. Product Manager, Same or Different?

Who's Steering the Ship and Charting the Course?

The industry has been divided, confused, and on the fence when it’s come to defining product management role as compared to product ownership. This post tries to shed some light on the differences between the two roles at a high level. I’ll be writing a separate post shortly on the current state in the industry and where I see the core issue for the misconceptions.

Product Owner is a role in Scrum framework (formally one of the three accountabilities in the Scrum Team). Product Manager, however, is a framework-agnostic discipline, which often refers to someone who oversees the whole lifecycle of a product. The role dates back to the 1930s and has recently been further popularised by tech companies.

In practice, different organisations approach the two roles very differently. In Scrum, the Product Owner owns his/her product end-to-end (so quite similar to a Product Manager). This encompasses both the strategic focus (visioning, goal setting, stakeholder management, release planning, product discovery, etc.) as well as the tactical one (product development and delivery, including product backlog management, refinement, value maximisation, etc.).

In some companies where Scrum is practiced, PMs and POs co-exist, where PMs often take care of the strategic area of the product (product discovery) and POs drive the tactical focus at team level (product development/delivery). Here the question should rather be "What is the right organisational design to foster rapid innovation, empirical learning, and value delivery?" That is the single most important measure. In my experience, there’s also a misconception around what a product is. How a product is scoped has a great impact on the product’s organisational structure.

Regardless of the industry’s divide and confusion on these two roles, it’s crucial for product leaders and product teams to stay focused on core values and principles of empirical and incremental product development and not get overly carried away by colourful models and frameworks out there (each of which tries to give you the false impression that they have a recipe for you). I’ll treat these principles in a separate post. Interested?

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This was a mini-blog post. If you’d like to see an expanded post on this topic, give it a like or leave a comment.