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The PO vs PM madness
The Product Manager versus Product Owner debate keeps spreading and it’s painful to hear the complete madness that is going on. Is there a difference between the two roles? Who owns what? How should they collaborate? And so on.
I am hopeful that this article will provide some clarity, given the terrifying degree of noise around this. And I’ll try to do that by sharing what some of the most influential product people are saying about this.
Madness #1: PO is the same as PM
This one gives me goosebumps and it shouldn't really need clarification. Still, as Melissa Perri puts it:
“Product Owner is a role you play in a Scrum team. Product Manager is the job.”
It’s important to understand that what Scrum may help us with is to ensure that “you’ve built a product increment that satisfies the Sprint Goal and meets the Definition of Done.” Yet, as explained by Maarten Dalmijn, the actual value that particular product increment brings is another story… Unfortunately, that goes beyond what Scrum and the role of the Product Owner, have to offer.
However, the reality is that people are “confusing the rituals of a delivery process, with the skills and responsibilities of a major job on a product team”, to quote Marty Cagan.
They struggle to understand that the PO role is really just a fraction of the total job of a Product Manager. Although this may be crystal clear when we understand the PM role in an empowered product team model, it may not be so straightforward when companies still do what we often refer to as “traditional product management”.
As Teresa Torres puts it, this is where the “product manager sits in the middle between business stakeholders and the engineering team.” In this model, the Product Manager is translating the user and business needs, writing long lists of requirements, and handing them over to the engineering team — who are acting pretty much as mercenaries.
In Scrum, even though the team works in shorter cycles (sprints) and the requirements are written in the format of user stories…
