"What is the difference between a product owner and a product manager?" This is one of the most common questions from our product owner classes.  

Our answer: you need both. You need a strategic focus - someone looking at the longer term. Someone who understands the market, the competitor landscape, and the regulatory environment. And someone who gets the funding. You also need someone who can speak for the customer close to the development of the product. Development of technical products raises many questions as the team gets the work done. Delays in getting answers to these questions can lead to missed opportunities or wasted effort. Let's look at this difference in more detail.

The Product Manager

According to Pragmatic Marketing, the role of the product manager is strategic. The product manager focuses on:

• Strategic Direction
• Market Relevance
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Customer-Centric Focus
• Product Lifecycle Management
• Decision-Making Authority
• Performance Measurement
• Innovation and Adaptability

When I read through this list, I see a clear focus on long-term success of a product. What I don't see is a clear focus on delivery. Perhaps this is the difference. Product managers focus on strategic direction while product owners focus on feature delivery.  

We find some overlap or confusion around customer-centric focus, with the product manager gathering and prioritizing requirements, or decision-making authority, and second-guessing decisions the product owner might be making.  

In general, the product manager is strategic while the product owner is tactical. If I have questions about the strategic direction for a product or the potential opportunity of adding new functionality, I ask the product manager. If I want to know what will be delivered by what date, or why one feature is being delivered before another, I ask the product owner.  

This is by far the simplest definition, and it works quite well in many contexts. The product owner, being tight with the delivery team, is much more involved on a tactical level.  

However, this can still be confusing. Looking further into Pragmatic Marketing's definition, the product manager seems to claim more and more responsibility for planning the roadmap or feature definition and prioritization. The list of product manager responsibilities according to Pragmatic Marketing includes:  

• Product Strategy and Vision Development
• Market and Customer Research
• Product Roadmap Planning
• Feature Definition and Prioritization
• Cross-Functional Team Leadership
• Product Development Oversight
• Performance Monitoring and Optimization
• Stakeholder Communication and Reporting
• Budget and Resource Management
• Compliance and Quality Assurance

Lots of strategic, mid-to long-range thinking. But now we are definitely getting into roadmaps and work (feature) definition. There is even oversight - whatever that means - of development.

The Product Owner

On the other hand, the Agile Alliance defines the key activities of a product owner as to:

• Clearly identify and describe product backlog items to build a shared understanding of the problem and solution with the product development team.
• Make decisions regarding the priority of product backlog items to deliver maximum outcome with minimum output.
• Determine whether a product backlog item was satisfactorily delivered.
• Ensure transparency into the upcoming work of the product development team.

This defines a tactical role, close to the team, focused on delivery. Everything from what is getting built to the order it is developed. There's an element of value delivery - making sure what is built maximizes the expected return on investment. There is even a hint of determining that the outcomes are actually achieved. I also appreciate that goal of working with the team to get alignment around some of the technical concerns. Definitely much more than the vague and distant 'oversight' role of the product manager.  

Context really does matter. I've seen situations in which product managers report to product owners. I've seen product managers drop large, poorly defined features onto startled development teams - somehow the teams are responsible for breaking down and delivering the feature over several months to hit a fixed deadline. And I've seen families of product owners trying to deliver a complex service offering with different user groups. Clearly, we need to understand the roles of product manager and product owner a little more.

Product People

Let’s start with definitions. The challenge seems to be tied to the perceived hierarchy and influence implicit in the titles of product manager and product owner.  

My favourite route around this came from a friend who described everyone involved as ‘product people’. Her thesis was that we need lots of different roles to understand, define, and deliver a great product. Each of these roles are essential to successful delivery, and so everyone involved are product people. Therefore, instead of hierarchies, we have a team of roles – product people with different but connected responsibilities.

If we recognize the need for a team of product people, we can move beyond names and roles, and consider the responsibilities required to deliver a great product.

Tactical vs Strategic Direction

For a small product, or a great new startup idea, we need one product person. In this case, that product person will be doing a little bit of everything. As we scale, that need changes.  

If we have a large existing product with a huge customer base, we will have a team of product people. This team of product people will be in constant conversation, collaborating to get the right thing out at the right time. It will take effort and alignment to maximize outcomes while minimizing output. Sounds familiar, right?

In both cases, we need a strategic direction, aligned to a market, with a deep appreciation for the customer. We also need strong tactical awareness, with responsibility for navigating the challenges of building what is needed as quickly and cleanly as possible. We can think of this as a top-to-bottom axis, with strategic direction at the top and tactical direction at the bottom.

Whole Product vs Product Elements

Often many product people are working together to deliver a large and complex product or service. Large products, such as a large retail e-commerce site, often have conflicting needs - an efficient and distraction free buy flow, a speedy product search capability, complex product configuration options, marketing campaigns and branded experiences, for example.  

In this case we need someone with an eye on the broader picture – responsible for how the many diverse elements work together to deliver a consistent, coherent experience. At the same time, we need product people optimizing different elements within the whole experience. Someone focused on optimizing the buy flow conversion funnel, others optimizing data imports or search, and so on.

Imagine this as an axis stretching left to right, from looking at the product experience for a single product (or as a whole when looking at large products) to looking at individuals experiences within a larger product, we now have a framework defining the different types of product people we need.  

What do we need of our 'product people'? We need:

• Ownership of the whole
• Optimization of the elements (of the whole)
• Strategic thinking
• Tactical delivery

Product Responsibility Framework

Now we can see how different responsibilities might sit in different places. For small products – a single team with a single product owner - the product owner takes on all the roles defined. With no product complexity, the product owner takes on both the strategic thinking and the tactical delivery of a single product. Call this role product manager or product owner, it doesn't make much difference.

As we scale the product, we start adding more product people. Product managers to work on the strategic direction, product owners to focus on delivery.

As the complexity of the product grows, we need even more stratification. Now we see value stream owners focusing on a complete experience or value stream, and working with a team of product owners, each focusing on different elements or journeys within the product experience.  

We can even imagine different product people - business analysts and UX strategists, for example - and imagine where they might work.

• Business analysts define specifications while keeping an eye on the stability and overall design of your platform.
• UX strategists optimize user pathways for specific elements of your product experience.
• Value stream owners work with their team of product owners to ensure a coherent and continuously improving customer experience.
• And a product manager - maybe, think of this as the CEO of your product - driving the product development forward to strategically meet your customer needs.

As an exercise, think about the product people you have in your organization. Put aside their titles for a moment and consider their responsibilities. What do you expect of them? The product responsibility framework can help you define meaningful roles and working relationships between the people in your product team.  

In closing, building great products requires a lot of coordinated activity between skilled product people. Rather than struggling with role definitions and reporting lines, the product responsibility framework provides a different way to help your product people organize.  

The goal is an aligned team of product people. Each role covering some or all of the product, providing strategic and/or tactical direction. There may be some overlap, but the goal is to understand how each role contributes to a great product experience.  

What next?

Many organizations struggle to get their product managers and product owner roles working well together. We have helped our clients to visualize how all their product people contribute to the success of your product. The result is a harmonious and aligned product team, full of motivated product people working together to deliver excellent product experiences. Get in touch and learn how you can re-invigorate your product team.