Gavin Deadman
Product Owner is a job role that came out of Scrum and although many organisations use it as a job title that is interchangeable with Product Manager, it’s not correct. In Scrum the Product Owner is defined as the person who is responsible for creating PBI’s and grooming the backlog, in Agile it was defined as the representative of the business, and neither entirely describe the full breadth of a Product Manager’s responsibilities.
Product Owner is a role you play in an Agile team, whereas a Product Manager is the job title of someone responsible for a product and its outcome on the customer and the business.
Now a lot of Product Owners out there are great Product Managers, and they should just change their title. But a fair number of Product Owners have simply completed a certified Scrum product owner course and are told to just get on with managing the development backlog, which sets them up to fail as they never consider the broader role. So if you’re tasking a Product Owner with the broader product management responsibilities, make sure you provide the training they need to master the full breadth of the role (and then change their title).
The structure of the product organisation and culture also has a bearing on whether you have the autonomy to fulfil the Product Manager job. When using Agile / Lean methods it should be the Agile team (Product Manager, Product Designer and Dev team) who make the key product decisions / trade offs, instead it can often be held centrally at a senior management level, where multiple Product Managers / Owners are assigned random projects from a roadmap to just execute which is a more Waterfall / Project Management approach. Those who find themselves in this situation should find haven in a more empowered/Agile/product led organisation which will accelerate their learning and understanding of the full breadth of the Product Manager job.
