Hey hey hey. What's good awesome people? I hope you had a great weekend. Over the years, I kept getting questions about the differences between Product Manager and Product Owner. In the context of Scrum, is the Product Manager the owner of the product (or the Product Owner)? Or is the Product Manager the superordinate of the Product Owner who give list of requirements to be detailed out by the Product Owner. Many people thought that the Product Owner only work in a Scrum team and do not have a scope in strategy level. Many people also thought that the Product Owner is just a requirements engineer who works on the Product Backlog. After having conversation with the Scrum co-founder, Ken Schwaber himself, in this video I explain why the Product Manager is not necessarily the Product Owner and how we should view the Product Owner. Hopefully it can help you understand the differences between the two. Have a great week ahead folks.
[VLOG] Why the Product Manager is not necessarily the Scrum Product Owner
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Comments (7)
Your explanation makes sense but as you say, it's all in the global understanding of terms. PO are, for the vast majority of people and organizations, the owner of the execution of the decisions made by the product organization. In many places, the ownership as you understand it has to be gained over time. There are lots and lots of places where the oldest tech person is ok fact an owner, in some.other places, it can be a PM or a head of product, in startups, it's normally the founder. Yet in all those places, the one running the day to day with the dev teams is the PO.
Let's simplify. There's no such thing as "Product Manager" in Scrum. There, it's that easy.
If we stop trying to explain legacy titles that exist as a remnant of last century, we can accelerate those titles disappearing from our lexicon.
Yes you are right. In Scrum the Product Owner is an accountability. Organisations who want to use Scrum most often map the Product Owner to the existing job title they already have. And most often the product managers is not the right person to be the Product Owner.
Yes. Scrum has evolved and has been used in large scale contexts where there are more than ten developers are developing the product. If you read the Scrum Guide, the day to day activities can be delegated to others - product manager can handle it. The Product Owner quite often is the founder or the Head of Product like you said.
Thanks for the video Joshua! Can you please point me to definition or description of a "Product"?
Sometimes in organizations I can observe that there are different levels of "Product" i.e. a whole business line is a product. Then a particular platform or system which supports this business line also is called an internal product and has its own product owner...
Hi Andris. I have already made a video about "what is a product" here https://youtu.be/eI902yApFm8
All the best.
Interesting I have written a post about what is expected from a product owner here: https://danieljosedasilva.c...