Still confused by the difference of Product Manager vs Product Owner
Hi everyone,
So I've spent most of my time in the last few months reading the recommended Scrum books. This would include the Scrum Pocket Guide and Agile Product Management. That being said, I think I have a fairly good understanding of a what a Product Owner, in isolation, is supposed to provide for their team and company.
However, I just got into Scrum Product Ownership and reading the explanations on the differences between PO vs PM is now a bit more confusing. Here's what I don't understand:
If a Product Owner is responsible for the product vision and acquiring feedback from Sprint Reviews and all of the available Adaptations phases, is the PO not partially doing the job of the Product Manager? Because how could a PO make a decision as to what the next best set of items would be if they didn't have some sort of quant feedback? Does the PO have a separate meeting with the PM to see what research has been gathered?
This leads me to the next question. If the PO is, in fact, doing some tasks that a PM would do, does this not create heavy head-clashing and conflict between the PO and PM when trying to determine what to build next, as per what the customer wants?
The real struggle for me is understanding how these two roles would even cooperate with each other. I come from a background where the PO and PM are both the same (company size is very small). And so my limited experience makes it difficult to imagine how the two would co-exist.
Would love to hear your opinions! Thanks.
Bryan,
It is my belief that the role of the Product Owner and Product Manager are one and the same, regardless of the size of the company.
In Scrum, there is the Product Owner Role, but there is not a Product Manager role. In other Agile practices, there is the Product Manager role, which has many of the same responsibilities and performs many of the same tasks as a Product Owner in Scrum does.
From your reading of the Scrum Guide, could it be the case that the Project Management function is refactored across all 3 Scrum roles?
"The real struggle for me is understanding how these two roles would even cooperate with each other."
I happen to work in such organization where having both Roles makes sense, and it is easy to guess, it is a very large scaled Organization. Where both PO and PM execute on same responsibilities, the area of what they are responsible for is slightly different. We have a lot of of different components and features delivered in each Release. Many different Scrum Teams are responsible for delivering the product. So, the PM is responsible for the overall Release: creates the overall Release goal, makes sure the overall Product meats the expectations, and so on. Then the POs deliver the info to the Scrum Teams they are working with. They deliver the info for the overall Release, but concentrate on only what is relevant to the Teams, which will be working on a certain features. Creates a Release goal relevant only to the Teams's delivery aligning it to the overall Release goal, and so on. Both PM and PO work hand by hand. Both PM and PO attend the Sprints Reviews. However, majority of the time we work with our PO. We do need the PO, because the PM is always very busy, not always easily available to us. But the PO is always here for us.
Hope it helps.
Bryan,
PO has to maximize the value produced by the Team, according with strategic suggestion of Stakeholders.
Stakeholders are also invited at Team Review ceremony to give feedbacks to the Team and to provide information in order to help PO in reordering backlog items.
Stakeholder may be Product Managers.
Stakeholders, Product Managers, Project Managers are usually committed on items in wich Product Owner is not involved (budget, marketing, suppliers, ....)
Product Owner has to join them, in regular meetings, to collect needs and suggestion and translate it in Backlog Items
in little companies may be Product Owner and Product Manager are the same, but have to use "half brain" with the team and "half brain" with other people.
the problem is when he act with the team as a Product Manager