“The product manager’s job is to oversee all aspects of a product or service line to create and deliver superior customer satisfaction while simultaneously providing long-term value for the company,” writes Linda Gorchels in the third edition of The Product Manager’s Handbook. This sounds similar to Ken Schwaber’s description of the product owner role in the Scrum Guide: “The Product Owner is the (…) person responsible for (…) ensuring the value of the work the team performs.” So what’s the difference between a product manager and a product owner?
Working as the product owner implies taking on many product management responsibilities including understanding the market, describing product functionality, and preparing the product launch. This makes product managers well suited to play this new role. But a product owner is more than just a re-branded product manager: Product owners tend to take on a wider range of duties, which makes the role multi-faceted and challenging. The following formula captures this insight:
Product Owner = Product Manager + x
My experience suggests that the x above comprises additional strategic duties including envisioning the product and maintaining the product roadmap as well as further tactical ones, such as collaborating with the development team throughout the development effort, writing user stories, carrying out release planning, and managing stakeholders. Consequently, product owners often require more authority and more focus to do their job well. Note that product ownership is teamwork in Scrum: Requirements are no longer identified and described by one person. Product owner, ScrumMaster and team collaborate on a regular basis to groom the product backlog.
Working as a first-time product owner is hence a new experience and challenge. The right training and coaching measures can help product owners get up to speed faster. “Early immersion and training of the product owners in agile principles, product backlog creation, user story design and estimation and planning is key to the success of any agile team. Also, beyond initial training, continuous product owner coaching throughout the rollout is necessary to ingrain the new process into the culture,” write Fry and Greene about their experience at Salesforce.com in their article “Large Scale Agile Transformation in an On-Demand World.”
You can find more information on the product owner role, its duties and helpful practices in my book Agile Product Management with Scrum. I also advise and coach product owners. Have a look at my services and get in touch to discuss how they can benefit your product owners.
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I always felt it was the other way around, where Product Manager = Product Owner + 1.
In any case I believe that the role of the Product Manager in Agile is always confused with that of the Product Manager in waterfall (traditional) projects.
In any case, I have published an article discussing the situation where you have no product owner. I hope you’ll have the chance to read it!
Hi Johanna, As I explain in my post, I view the product owner role as broader than the product manager’s. For an overview of what I consider as the product owner duties, please have a look at: http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/roles/one-page-product-owner/ My experience working with product managers in a traditional setting suggests that the individuals rarely collaborate closely with the team during the actual development of the product. They rather rejoin the project towards its end to prepare the product launch. But you are certainly right to point out that the role of a product manager in an agile context differs from how the role is applied traditionally.