Product owner vs Product manager

This is an ongoing debate in the agile and product circles even after years have passed since these roles were defined. There seems to be confusion about the difference between the roles, are they even different or are they the same? The answer is often unclear.

If there was a one-line answer to this question, it would be that the Product Owner is a role the Product Manager plays in the delivery team. In larger organizations, this responsibility is split in two because of the complexity and attention needed to do each part. But was the role “Product Owner” defined for this objective? Let’s take a brief history lesson on how the Product Owner role came into existence.

Scrum’s failure to embrace the world of Product Management by coining a separate Product Owner role started with good intentions. It was to give Product Managers who lead mostly by influence a little more authority by calling them, Product Owners. The original definition of the Product Owner role meant that accountability for a successful product belonged to a single person. They were solely responsible for the value of the product delivered by a Scrum team and this role could be performed by anyone capable of doing so. It could be the CEO, the CPO, a VP, or a Senior PM.  

But it seemed to have caused the opposite. When companies started adopting Scrum, the Product Owner role didn’t replace the Product Manager role but rather was seen as a different role in itself which was never designed to co-exist with a Product Manager counterpart. The confusion created by the rebranding pushed Product managers away from the realms of scrum. When you explain to Product Managers that the Product Owner is actually the Product person with the greatest accountability over the product, they look at you with disbelief. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) encourages this misconception of dividing the product role into a strategic Product Manager role and a tactical Product Owner role. The market weighs the role of a Product manager heavier than that of the owner and hence the spoon-feeding of requests from the PM to the PO, appears to be the right solution. The PO then becomes a glorified order taker who is trapped in a sprint bubble.

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Here is a comparison of how the two roles look like in most organizations:

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Courtesy: Flipkart Product Manager role from Linkedin jobs.

The role focuses on developing a strategy and roadmap, being customer centric and managing external stakeholders.

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Courtesy: Apple Product owner role from Linkedin jobs.

The role focuses on planning and prioritizing the backlog, breaking down features into tactical user stories, and managing incremental product development. The role is quite popular in consulting and agencies where clients usually dictate the vision to be executed.

Pro tip: So when applying for roles, focus on the responsibilities and not the title.

The Product owner vs Product manager combo is a well-meaning solution to the problem that having a single owner who carries both accountability and responsibilities doesn’t scale. Since POs spend most of their time writing user stories each week, every week, they fall into The Build Trap. Therefore, the accountability required of them is powerless without Product Management happening at the team level. This means reminding the team that the Product Owner is a role Product Managers play on a Scrum team. Product Manager is the job. Without this background in Product Management, they can never be successful in making sure they are building the right thing. What matters, in the end, is creating value for the users and the business, not the role and the title. The debate is moot.

To get into Product management roles, check the PM School program here.