A Product Owner Isn’t Necessarily A Product Manager. Here’s Why It Matters.
A SaaS founder asked me recently, “What’s the difference between a product manager and a product owner?”
Some people think that product managers are just an interchangeable term for product owners, but this is not the case.
The job of a product manager is to focus the team on solving the most valuable customer problems.
They ensure the engineers are building things that matter to customers and will drive the business towards its goals. They talk to customers regularly, analyze data, pull together research, help the engineers break down work into manageable pieces, and make dozens of micro-product decisions to help the team hit their sprint goal.
Product management is a career, a discipline, and a craft just like software engineering, marketing, or design is.
Product management is the process of making sure that products are created with customers in mind and that they meet customer needs. It is an intersection between business strategy, engineering, marketing and design. A product manager may also think strategically and tactically about how to create customer engagement and delight through their products.
Product managers not only define what will be built but also prioritize what should be built first, determine when it should go live, measure the success of their efforts, and make changes based on those metrics.
Good product managers have to have strong communication skills as well as leadership capabilities so they can collaborate effectively with cross-functional stakeholders.
On the other hand, a product owner is just the name of a particular role within agile scrum.
They provide clarity to the team about the goal. All work is derived and prioritized based on the Product Goal in order to deliver value to all stakeholders including those within their organization and all users both inside and out.
They manage the backlog, ensuring that it’s visible and understood. This person can be a developer or a QA. In the context of scrum, they are wearing the hat of “product owner”.
Think of it like a meeting where you designate a note-taker. “Note-taking” isn’t a career, it’s just a role within a specific context.
For more in-depth read Inspired by Marty Cagan
Why does the definition matter?
If you’re looking to hire a product manager, you want to understand the kind of person you need and that it’s a very senior role.
However, if you just need to designate someone on the team to play the owner role, that person doesn’t have to be a PM.