New to the Product Owner area

Sorry if it sounds ironic, but reading Scrum guide is a good first step. 

And after reading basics (Scrum guide and Evidence based management guide) please start your journey here https://www.scrum.org/courses/recommended-courses-product-owners  . You dont need to attand paid classes unless you want to. There are tons of free material here on this site

Product Owners in Scrum are Agile Product Managers.

The Scrum Guide tells us the minimum Product Owner accountabilities needed to play the game of Scrum. Effective Product Owners will have to bring much more than what the Scrum Guide states, and they usually have a wide array of product management skills, experience, and knowledge. The organization also gives them an abundance of decision-making authority.

@Chris Belknap With all due respect to your knowledge and contribution, the Product Owner is NOT the 'Agile Product Manager.' The key difference lies in the PO's position within the team compared to the Product Manager. The PO is a regular team member without any authority over other members, while the Product Manager is part of the management hierarchy and holds a position of authority.

In short, the Product Manager, even an Agile one, manages the product itself (portfolio of features, lifecycle, revenue, and revenue per employee). Meanwhile, the Product Owner focuses on creating (emphasizing the distinction between 'creating' and 'managing') the vision of the product, participates in strategic decisions about which products to invest in, and contributes to establishing Agile transformation and the self-management of Scrum teams. The PO actively engages stakeholders with developers through Sprint Reviews or other events, while stakeholder engagement with developers is not the Product Manager's concern. In fact, if an organization has both a PO and a Product Manager, the Product Manager is considered one of the stakeholders

@Nicholas - Thank you for your thoughtful reply—no disrespect taken.

You're absolutely right that Product Owners and Product Managers can have distinct roles in organizations that include both. In some cases, they’re the same person, with the Product Manager also taking on Product Owner accountabilities. And not every organization even has Product Managers. The term Agile Product Manager has no standard definition and varies widely across companies—but that wasn’t really my point.

My point is this: for Scrum to be truly effective, I believe Product Owners need deep product management skills.

Here’s what I often see and hear: Product Owners acting as proxies for someone outside the Scrum Team, with little authority to make decisions. The work gets delegated to the Product Owner, who has little authority, making them a proxy. They get reduced to writing user stories and acceptance criteria or managing 'tickets'. Any time the team or another stakeholder challenges the Product Owner, the response is typically 'I have to ask...', delaying decisions. Worse, some teams don’t even have a Product Owner. No goals are ever set - the team is simply a feature factory, leading to low intrinsic motivation because they have no purpose.

The best Product Owners I’ve seen use product management skills and techniques to guide the entire product lifecycle and drive long-term business outcomes. They’re empowered to set a compelling product vision and Product Goals. They engage in activities like customer interviews, market research, stakeholder management, business cases, branding, own budgets, build product roadmaps, create release forecasts, and focus on maximizing ROI while closing the customer satisfaction gap.

Scrum on!

I concur Product Owners and Product Managers overlap or vary by organization, and "Agile Product Manager" is a blurry term. You are correct—Scrum does suffer when Product Owners are not empowered, being proxies or ticket-shufflers, directionless teams being the result. I view it somewhat differently, however: although product management skill assists, effective Product Owners I have seen them flourish with domain understanding and decisiveness over. Empowerment is the key, vision and value will give you a complete product management set. Thoughts?