Product Manager vs

Clarifying the Roles of Product Manager and Product Owner

• Product management is a long-standing discipline focused on owning and growing a product for successful market entry.
• Product owners were created in the early 2000s, particularly in Scrum, to take responsibility for bad requirements and improve the development team's efficiency.
• There is an overlap between the roles of product management and product owners, and it is crucial to ensure that they work together or separately effectively.
• Product owners are responsible for the product backlog, which is the fuel for the Scrum engine, and they must ensure that the requirements are clear and well-understood.
• They need to work with the team to refine the requirements and prepare them for the Sprint.
• Product owners are also responsible for providing the team with a clear vision of what they are doing, either directly or through the product manager's guidance.
• The product owner is like a mini-person in charge of a product line, responsible for prioritizing the backlog and ensuring that the team delivers the highest value.
• They need to have a business mindset, vision-setting, inspiration, and customer connection skills.
• The product manager's role is more generic and can span across multiple disciplines, not just software.
• The product manager is responsible for owning and growing a product for successful market entry, ensuring it meets the right timing, price, and other criteria.
• The product owner's role was created to take away some of the blame from the development team for bad requirements and put it on the business side.
• It is essential to clarify the roles and ensure that product management and product owners work together effectively to achieve a successful product.

Clarifying the Roles of Product Manager and Product Owner

• Product management is a long-standing discipline focused on owning and growing a product for successful market entry.
• Product owners were created in the early 2000s, particularly in Scrum, to take responsibility for bad requirements and improve the development team's efficiency.
• There is an overlap between the roles of product management and product owners, and it is crucial to ensure that they work together or separately effectively.
• Product owners are responsible for the product backlog, which is the fuel for the Scrum engine, and they must ensure that the requirements are clear and well-understood.
• They need to work with the team to refine the requirements and prepare them for the Sprint.
• Product owners are also responsible for providing the team with a clear vision of what they are doing, either directly or through the product manager's guidance.
• The product owner is like a mini-person in charge of a product line, responsible for prioritizing the backlog and ensuring that the team delivers the highest value.
• They need to have a business mindset, vision-setting, inspiration, and customer connection skills.
• The product manager's role is more generic and can span across multiple disciplines, not just software.
• The product manager is responsible for owning and growing a product for successful market entry, ensuring it meets the right timing, price, and other criteria.
• The product owner's role was created to take away some of the blame from the development team for bad requirements and put it on the business side.
• It is essential to clarify the roles and ensure that product management and product owners work together effectively to achieve a successful product.

Clarifying the Roles of Product Manager and Product Owner

• Product management is a long-standing discipline focused on owning and growing a product for successful market entry.
• Product owners were created in the early 2000s, particularly in Scrum, to take responsibility for bad requirements and improve the development team's efficiency.
• There is an overlap between the roles of product management and product owners, and it is crucial to ensure that they work together or separately effectively.
• Product owners are responsible for the product backlog, which is the fuel for the Scrum engine, and they must ensure that the requirements are clear and well-understood.
• They need to work with the team to refine the requirements and prepare them for the Sprint.
• Product owners are also responsible for providing the team with a clear vision of what they are doing, either directly or through the product manager's guidance.
• The product owner is like a mini-person in charge of a product line, responsible for prioritizing the backlog and ensuring that the team delivers the highest value.
• They need to have a business mindset, vision-setting, inspiration, and customer connection skills.
• The product manager's role is more generic and can span across multiple disciplines, not just software.
• The product manager is responsible for owning and growing a product for successful market entry, ensuring it meets the right timing, price, and other criteria.
• The product owner's role was created to take away some of the blame from the development team for bad requirements and put it on the business side.
• It is essential to clarify the roles and ensure that product management and product owners work together effectively to achieve a successful product.

Clarifying the Roles of Product Manager and Product Owner

• Product management is a long-standing discipline focused on owning and growing a product for successful market entry.
• Product owners were created in the early 2000s, particularly in Scrum, to take responsibility for bad requirements and improve the development team's efficiency.
• There is an overlap between the roles of product management and product owners, and it is crucial to ensure that they work together or separately effectively.
• Product owners are responsible for the product backlog, which is the fuel for the Scrum engine, and they must ensure that the requirements are clear and well-understood.
• They need to work with the team to refine the requirements and prepare them for the Sprint.
• Product owners are also responsible for providing the team with a clear vision of what they are doing, either directly or through the product manager's guidance.
• The product owner is like a mini-person in charge of a product line, responsible for prioritizing the backlog and ensuring that the team delivers the highest value.
• They need to have a business mindset, vision-setting, inspiration, and customer connection skills.
• The product manager's role is more generic and can span across multiple disciplines, not just software.
• The product manager is responsible for owning and growing a product for successful market entry, ensuring it meets the right timing, price, and other criteria.
• The product owner's role was created to take away some of the blame from the development team for bad requirements and put it on the business side.
• It is essential to clarify the roles and ensure that product management and product owners work together effectively to achieve a successful product.

Thinking Aloud about Product Owners and Product Managers

• The webinar is hosted by Mark Griffin, the director of Customer Solutions and the host of Constructs Inspect and Adapt podcasts.

• The webinar is part of the Thinking Aloud series by Construct Senior Fellow Earl Beatty.

• Earl has been working with several clients on similarities and differences between a product owner and a product manager.

• The webinar focuses on core terms that drive the relationship between product owners and product managers.

• Product owners and product managers should focus on problems or opportunities where they can get the most return on the investment of the team's time.

• A product is a collection of technologies applied to solve a selected consumer problem within the constraints of the business's budget and technologies.

• The product manager's role involves understanding the market, evaluating opportunities, understanding existing solutions, and choosing which needs to address.

• The product owner's role involves queuing up features that enable capabilities envisioned by the product manager.

• The biggest conflict between product owners and product managers is in the area of requirements.

• A framework is provided to help think about packaging decisions and where to keep the content of requirements work.

• A job aid is provided to help decide who's doing what between product owners and product managers.

• The webinar ends with a brief summary and a Q&A session.Product Managers vs Product Owners: Understanding Roles and Requirements

• Product managers define the problems/opportunities to be addressed and work with technology leadership and business community to determine what can be built with positive ROI and align with overall business strategy.

• Product owners work closely with product managers to implement the roadmap and feed the development team, while also balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders beyond product management.

• Product owners are experts in business and requirements analysis, skilled in decomposing and analyzing the business to formulate usable chunks to feed the team.

• Product owners can be seen as backlog stewards, responsible for arranging the backlog and ensuring it goes in the right order for the development team to fulfill the roadmap.

• Product owners have deep understanding of how to do requirements analysis and business analysis, which creates requirements in the form of decisions that are imposed on implementation.

• There are two main types of decisions in product development: problem/opportunity decisions and solution decisions.

• Product managers typically focus on the high-level problem/opportunity decisions, while product owners focus on the detailed solution decisions.

• Technology leaders own the top of the decision stack, while developers own the bottom, responsible for the ultimate authority of decisions in line with the top.

• Requirements can be captured in a customer requirements document, which collects decisions about problems/opportunities in the market and what customers are looking for.

• The customer requirements document should be advisory, not binding, and serve as the voice of the customer to understand their needs and measure their success.

• The product manager owns the customer requirements document, while the product owner focuses on the detailed requirements and artifacts that drive the actual work.

• Packaging ideas for requirements include a product vision, roadmap, use cases, and designs, which can be tailored to the specific needs of the organization and stakeholders.Distinguishing Between Product Owners and Product Managers

• Product managers take the lead on marketing and product requirements documents.

• Product requirements modify customer requirements to fit within technological and business constraints.

• Product owners decompose product requirements and prioritize workflows for the team.

• Workflows are broken down into courses or paths for the product owner to populate the backlog.

• The product backlog is constantly updating, while product requirements tend to be more stable.

• The product owner is responsible for making decisions based on criteria set by the product manager.

• The product manager captures and communicates the product vision and sets overall themes and release goals.

• Prioritizing defects may fall under the responsibility of the product owner.

• Estimating the expected rate of output for the development team may also fall under the product owner's responsibility.

• The product owner executes the visions and decisions set up by product management.

• Product management should span across multiple engineering teams and other assisting teams.

• The preferred model is one product, one product manager, and one product owner, with potentially multiple dev teams.Product Management Q&A Session

• One person managing the product vision and stories is ideal for smaller startups, but as the company scales, it becomes difficult to manage both roles effectively.

• The discipline of business analysis is still relevant, and product owners should have those skills under their belt.

• A team of business analysts can support a product owner when dealing with large projects.

• When dealing with existing technologies, hard decisions need to be made about the primary consumer and workflows that need to be supported.

• Virtual whiteboard spaces like Miro and Zoom whiteboards are dynamic workspaces that can be used for collaboration and productivity.

• The ideal product manager/product owner to business analyst ratio depends on the number of customer classes.

• If there is no product owner, an engineering manager can step in to substitute the role.

• The product manager owns the problem space, and if the product owner and manager disagree, the product manager wins.

• If the product owner and manager are too technical, they may be too focused on features instead of solving problems.

• Pragmatic Institute can help train product managers to understand their role and responsibilities.

• Startups that focus on solving core problems with technology are more successful than those focused on technology alone.

• We should always be asking how a feature will make our consumers better and try to understand the why behind decisions.

Agile Software Development from the Product Owner Perspective

• The Product Owner has a vision for the product, knows its purpose, and turns the stakeholders' needs into user stories.

• The development team is small, co-located, cross-functional, and self-organizing. They release early and often, usually 4-6 user stories per week.

• Capacity is measured by counting the number of stories released per week, and the team invests in automated testing and continuous integration to maintain pace.

• The team must avoid overloading by limiting the number of stories worked on simultaneously, either through Yesterday's Weather or limiting WIP.

• The Product Backlog is managed by prioritizing what stories to work on next and saying "no" to requests that would overload the team.

• Prioritization is based on relative guesses of story value and size, with the Product Owner collaborating with the team and stakeholders to make informed decisions.

• Backlog grooming is done in a just-in-time fashion to take advantage of insights and feedback, with the team and stakeholders collaborating in a weekly workshop.

• There is a trade-off between different types of value, short-term versus long-term thinking, building the right thing versus building it right, and new product development versus old product improvement.

• The Product Owner is responsible for managing stakeholders' expectations, making forecasts using velocity and burn-up charts, and being honest about what can be delivered within a fixed time or scope.

• The goal is to reach the desired outcome with the least possible output, and reducing scope is generally preferred over extending time.

• Successful product ownership requires passion, communication, and a focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

• The most important job of the Product Owner is to decide what NOT to build and taking the consequences of that decision, with continuous learning and improvement through feedback loops.Agile Product Ownership: Key Points to Consider

• Real data and honesty are important in Agile forecasting.

• Technical debt accumulation and lack of continuous improvement can slow down teams and make forecasting difficult.

• The team is responsible for maintaining a sustainable pace and avoiding shortcuts.

• In larger projects with multiple teams, capacity management, stakeholder communication, and backlog grooming are still necessary.

• Velocity is the sum of all output and can be used for forecasting.

• Product Owners have an additional responsibility to communicate with each other and minimize dependencies.

• Chief Product Owner role is needed in large projects to keep Product Owners synchronized.

• Agile focuses on short feedback loops and continuous improvement.

• Product Owners have the authority to say "no" to stakeholders.

• Agile promotes collaboration among team members and stakeholders.

• Backlog grooming involves prioritizing and refining items in the backlog.

• The Agile approach values adaptability and flexibility to change.