Product Manager vs Product Owner 🤷‍♀️ What Are The Differences?

Product Owner versus Product Manager ... what are the differences?
In this video, I will share my thoughts on why the product manager is not necessarily the Product Owner.
#agile #productmanagement #scrum

[@lukes5631]

The English language is in and of itself a framework, one in which we use to communicate with one another. I am 100% in agreement with you.

[@scrummasterinblack]

Thanks Luke 🙂🙏

[@kellanimation9522]

very informative

[@terrancejenkins2204]

Your videos are excellent! I’m currently enrolled in a scrum certification course and I’m thinking about getting the product owner certification as well. Very well explained and entertaining!

[@scrummasterinblack]

Thank you for the kind words. All the best for your future endeavours 🙌

[@andreigavrila2742]

good video, on point explanations. great job! what did you use to create the restaurant animations? they were top notch!

[@donye3286]

Thanks Joshua

[@tommyfadillah5789]

Not that "Safe" 😁, anyway awesome video as usual!

[@scrummasterinblack]

Is the Product Manager the same as the Product Owner?

[@janek29567]

Where did you make these animations with examples? :)

[@baertheblader9402]

So what if you are a “Susan” in your company, and you were hired to be the “product owner” on a scrum team, because Pradeep has many other responsibilities and limited time; He trusts your judgement and leaves you be to manage all the day to day responsibilities of the product owner role on the scrum team, but still controls the budget and dictates overall business strategy; He is respectful not to step on your toes with the developers to not confuse the dynamic, but maintains a rarely used veto power and manages the interactions with those higher up in the company? Is your scrum broken in this situation? Are you not truly the product owner? Should you step aside and tell Pradeep that he is the real product owner and should thus be the one writing user stories, prioritizing the backlog, meeting with the developers, and accepting the completed PBIs? Should you tell Pradeep to step aside and let you, as product owner, have complete control over the product? How do most companies handle this dynamic?

[@scrummasterinblack]

Hi thanks for the question. In the Scrum Guide it is written that the Product Owner can delegate the responsibilities such as writing the PBIs, ordering the PB, etc to others in the company ;) Which actually makes sense, since they're the owner ... Yes, Pradeep is the real Product Owner ... and clearly he has delegated tactical work to Susan. He still have what is needed to be called as an owner. In this case, Susan is more like a manager rather than an owner. From my experience there are two options. A). Yes, let's not call Susan as the Product Owner because she does not have what she need to completely own the product .. and just call her as the product manager instead or; B). If we still want to call Susan as the Product Owner, let's give her what she need to be the owner of the product which currently is still in Pradeep's hand. Most of the time in my experience, the companies I work with chose A) because it's easier ... they only change label and they don't have the change their career and compensation structure. But I have also seen B) once. And it was an amazing company to work with.

[@RizkySyaiful]

"dictates overall business strategy" == "decide the feature of the product". Which makes Pradeep is still the product owner in Scrum persepective, and should attend the sprint planning & sprint review no matter busy he is. The result? In my experience, better product performance in most of the cases & super-alignment in all of the cases.

[@baertheblader9402]

@@RizkySyaiful that to me seems like a huge flaw in Scrum. It works for a small startup maybe, but not a large organization. I won’t call what we do “scrum” because unless it’s perfect, people get upset, but we do a scrum-like process. My supervisor was the product owner, but he was promoted, and thus so was I. It’s my job to decide what new features are needed and I make sure we keep moving towards the product goal, but I did not determine the product goal. This product serves a very specific purpose for an internal department. It’s not like I can just change it on a whim. I would bet that if I decided to start wasting money on useless features that do not serve the needs of the department I would loose my job. That means I actually do not have the authority to change the product goal. But also, I don’t want to. They rely on me to keep the product on track. Per this definition, I am not really the product owner. Who is? My supervisor, the original product owner? He does have say over the budget which sort of gives him veto power over the really big stuff that I might want to do. Maybe the original department head who decided we needed this application in the first place? In reality it was probably her all along, but she has since moved on. Is it the current department head? She is trying to get her bearings still and doesn’t really worry about the application like the original head did. She leaves that to me. As far as the developers know, I am the product owner. We all have bosses, we all have people that hold us accountable. That is unless the product owner is the CEO or at least someone high enough that they have full autonomy over not only the application but the line of business that the application is for. That just isn’t practical. I do this as a full time job.

[@scrummasterinblack]

The purpose of Scrum is not to hide the organisation dysfunctions but to expose it so organisations can improve. And if they want you to be the owner of the product, what is impeding the organisations to give you the authority & budget needed so you can have ownership over the product? Yes I have seen many big corporations give authority & budget to the product owner even though the PO is from the lower rank/pay grade in the organisation structure. No it's not about whether you are a large corp or a startup, it's about trust in your people. I have also seen many startup companies who don't trust the people who are labeled as Product Owner - Scrum also won't be effective there.

[@RizkySyaiful]

@@baertheblader9402 Interesting. So, you decide the features but not the product goal. Who does determine the product goal then?

[@om-qz7kp]

Mmm, not convinced

[@scrummasterinblack]

Mmmh. How come?

[@om-qz7kp]

@@scrummasterinblack not sure the product owner is always involved with all the activities you mentioned, especially the financial side. I would be expecting the PO to be more on getting the right thing done and the financials sorted by the product manager. But this based on my experience, on non-software products. Thx for checking the comment anyway.

[@scrummasterinblack]

@@om-qz7kp in a company, which do you think is higher, company owner or company manager?

[@om-qz7kp]

@@scrummasterinblack to be honest, I do not think this is a good parallel. But I ll tell you my opinion. The company owner is not a ceo or a salesman, despite being higher in the hierarchy. The company manager will take all the executive / operative decisions. The product owner is a role within scrum with specific tasks, 100% engaging with the stakeholders but some of the tasks he does in your video are actually product manager's, at least in the companies I ve seen so far. I am not saying its wrong but I haven't heard of this or seen this before. Again thanks for engaging in a conversation on this topic! Really appreciated!

[@scrummasterinblack]

@@om-qz7kp It also depends on which school of thoughts the company adopted. In Scrum.org school of thoughts, the Product Owner is like the company owner, spending more time on strategies for the product and can delegate tactical activities to others.