What is the difference between a product manager and a product owner?

What is the difference between a product manager and a product owner?

Translated by: Somia Manjezi, an expert in window product analysis of the Khuzestan province investment unit of Fanap

Product Manager and Product Owner; These two terms are often used interchangeably and certainly overlap. However, in reality, the roles of product manager and product owner are different from each other. In this article, we look at the role of the product owner versus the product manager and examine the different skills and responsibilities.

At the highest level, there are several competing definitions for product managers and product owners. But as far as consensus goes about the fundamental difference between product managers and product owners, it's this:

Product managers are strategic. They focus on the product vision, company goals, and market. Product owners (which you'll typically find in agile organizations) are more tactical. They translate the product manager's strategy into actionable tasks and work with agile teams to implement these requirements.

This article examines each of these roles and examines the similarities and differences between them.

Define the role of product manager

Product management strategically develops, markets, supports and continuously improves a company's products. The Product Manager role focuses on long-term strategy, product vision, market trends and identifying new opportunities.

The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) training site provides useful definitions of Product Managers and Product Owners, which we summarize here.

DAD describes the role of the product manager in strategic practice and focuses on the long-term vision of the product, observing trends in the market, identifying potential new outcomes or product support topics, and supporting sales. Accepting the product and ensuring that the product meets the needs of the value stream(s) with which the product is involved."

DAD describes the product manager's role in strategic action and focuses on the long-term vision for the product, on observing trends in the market, on identifying potential new outcomes or issues to be supported by the product, on supporting product sales, and on ensuring that the product meets needs. It fulfills the value stream(s) with which the product is involved."

The DAD site also describes the Product Manager as:

     Product marketing
     Product sales support
     budgeting
     Long term forecast
     Customer care
     Support the solution team

Define the role of the product owner

As product management expert Roman Pichler explains the distinction between a product manager and a product owner, the role of the product owner goes back to the agile Scrum methodology for project management. As a result, product owners today are mostly found in organizations that use an agile development approach.

"Product owners are more tactical in practice," and "they work closely with delivery teams to ensure they perform well. POs or product owners translate the product manager's high-level vision into detailed requirements. "To do this, they work closely with a range of product stakeholders, including non-customer stakeholders such as finance, security operations, support, audit and others."

The DAD site explains that Product Owners fulfill their responsibilities through tactical activities such as:

     Attending team coordination meetings
     Organizing demos
     Conduct sufficient analysis to ensure requirements are ready to work
     Engage in continuous testing efforts

Is a product manager the same as a product owner?

As Roman Pichler argues, the product owner has the role of product management. However, he also points out that smaller, younger organizations—especially in the software industry—can more quickly lead the product owner to take responsibility for product development without the need to form a product management team; But in the long term, Pichler suggests, these organizations should create a separate role for the product manager.

So, in short, Product Owners and Product Managers are not the same under different names, but two unique functions.

Some organizations, often due to lack of resources, may have a product owner who also takes on the more strategic responsibilities of a product manager. However, as DAD notes in describing PMs and POs, each of these roles has a different focus, and each represents a full-time job.

As product management consulting and training firm 280 Group explains on its product manager comparison page, here's a great overview of the different responsibilities of each role:

As you can see, there are similarities between these tasks. For example, both roles lead the product through the development process and work with multiple similar teams across the organization.

In fact, as Group 280 explains, in some cases, a PO may assume some of the more strategic roles of a PM, and vice versa. But in an agile organization, the team will have the roles of Product Owners and Product Managers, each responsible for some of the functions listed above.

That is, you can think of the product owner as a kind of product manager—more tactical, more internal—who helps drive product development in an agile organization.

What skills does a product owner need?

An effective product owner (especially in an agile development organization) requires outstanding communication skills.

This is because a major part of a product owner's job is to translate a product manager's high-level vision for a product into practical tasks. As a result, product owners are key people for developers, QA (quality assurance), UI, UX and designers.

That's why we argue that product owners should possess several of the broader skills every product manager needs, such as communicating clearly with a variety of professionals and excellent listening skills.

Can a product owner also be a product manager?

The short answer is yes: a product owner can be a product manager and vice versa.

As Melissa Perry, CEO of Produx Labs, says in her Product Manager vs. Product Owner article, "As a product manager, your roles and responsibilities change depending on the context and stage of your product." And "Product Owner is the role you play in a Scrum Team. Product Manager is a job."

Therefore, a single person can theoretically perform both tasks simultaneously.

As Roman Pichler says, this often happens to software startups that are not yet organizationally or financially ready to hire both.

What is the real difference between a product owner and a product manager?

The debate over where the product manager role ends and the product owner begins—or whether the two functions are just two different aspects of the same position—is likely to go on forever.

What is essential, however, is that your product organization has a team structure that works for your process, and that product managers and product owners on your team know exactly what their roles are and what their goals are.

منبع:

https://www.productplan.com/learn/product-manager-vs-product-owner/