Product Manager VS Product Owner

 

Hello there! 

I hope you are doing okay. I hope you had a great week and your weekend is going well too.

Today we will look at the difference between a Product Manager(PM) and. a Product Owner(PO). A lot of people have been confused about the difference between them. 

The thing is; the roles of a PM and a PO depend on the organization that they work for. But, in the general sense of things, there are a few roles and tasks that differentiate a PM from a PO. 

Let's start with the PM. The role of the PM in a general sense is to manage product development, work with the development team as well as other stakeholders involved in the product, improve the features, reach out to users to get feedback, conduct market research for the products as well as studying the company/product competition to get few points on how to improve and what users are interested in. 

For PO, A Scrum framework, made by a scrum team, defines a product owner as “responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team.” But what does this mean? It means that the product owner generates customer stories that the development team can use. They are the voice of the customer.

The product owner is responsible for the product backlog. This means they are responsible for a list of actionable tasks for new features, any change to existing features, bug fixes, etc. to make sure a team can attain a certain product outcome.

You're probably looking like; "umm.... what's the difference between a PO and PM then? Just backlog?" 

Funny enough, in some organizations, the PM does the descriptive work of both the PM and the PO, once again, it really depends on the organization. But in the general sense of things, the above description is the difference in the work of a PO and PM. 

In a tabular form, I have outlined the differences between a PM and PO. 

I know some PMs are probably looking like "but I do all of this", well, I guess you can regard yourself as a Product Person, lol.

I hope this brings a lot of clarity to the roles of a PM and PO. 

Till next time.

Franny.