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In my opinion, a product owner shouldn’t be a ‘title’ it’s more a role that a product manager plays.
PO responsibilities:
Building backlog,
Sprint planning,
Sprint grooming,
Retros,
Unblocking dev teams,
Translating department or product vision and roadmap into an action plan.
The title of a ‘PM’ can do all of this but not necisarily,
But more importantly, for sure there is data analysis,
Setting up A/B tests.
Working with the department to align the full product vision to the company vision,
Translating that into a roadmap,
Working with research/design teams on what qualitative research to undertake based on the findings of the data analytics findings you have performed.
Setting KPI’s for the product and monitoring performance to see what impact the product is having to the users and the business and communicating this to the larger business.
This is a mostly large misunderstanding by a lot of "agile" companies. A product owner is actuslly the most senior product role in an scrum company. They act with complete autonomy, are expected to fully understand the market and their operating conditions within it. They are best placed to respond to need and build fast when connecting the backlog to their market knowledge ànd the teams execution strategy through work item prioritization. A product manager doesn't exist in scrum as a product owner doesn't exist without autonomy.
If you are working some place they both exist, then you are not scrum based and the title is irrelevant. A lot of places will use this title in "scrum" or "agile" but in reality it's not valid. What I do see is a lot of I was a ba, now at my agile company I am a PO and thats bad. Product managers generally have a lesser role and responsibility than a true PO but it sounds like your not a PO so I'd take the title change.
The market however is far from reality and have skewed what these titles mean, each org views their roles and salary differently. I think a big part of this is also how the product community and it's systems have responded to agile and scrum. Your project office is no longer needed and is useless unless we manage the POS and the PO manages a backlog so that makes sense etc. It's generally all tied to a lack of understanding of effective agile methodology and the need to protect jobs through micro management. Even SaFE is pretty sketch tbh.
Agree, but since majority of companies continue having PM roles as more senior than PO, it is very confusing as a current PO because it makes me want to go down PM road, in order to make more strategic + big picture changes happen, and it seems orgs are ALLOWING only PMs do that, while PO roles are confined to “task” based agile work, backlog, roadmap etc
Short answer: yes change it. A product manager title has a better career path ahead.
Following for insights!
Long story short, yes, a PM does still do some PO responsibilities, but does a lot more.
Clearly there is a lot to do so trust and some d’élongation if possible is ideal.
Transform the team to self autonomy. Teams prefer this and grow more that way too.
What can help is to enstil a technical lead in the team and a design lead if there are multiple designers. Also onboard a scrum master so you have time to focus on measuring business success
Yes this is a no-brainer to do - it’ll improve your exit opportunities
Do you have product manager responsibilities aside from product analysis? That’s one small piece of the PM puzzle. Echoing what others are saying here, yes it will give you some more opps since strictly PO roles aren’t as abundant as PM roles, but at the end of the day they are two different roles and should be treated as such, especially in large orgs or companies with mature products.
This is super helpful. :) One note, is that I’ve seen scrum teams (true scrum) only have a PO on the team itself. So then, would a PM be responsible for multiple scrum teams, i.e the POs of one dept/branch would report to one PM? That would make sense, at least, consider PO=tactical and PM=strategic.
There seems to be some confusion here regarding seniority when these two roles are really adjacent to one another working as part of a cross-functional team with a Business Manager. A Business Manager sets a strategic vision for a given product area. Then, a Product Manager determines what to build (identifies specific product opportunities and product enhancements to construct a product roadmap that is based on the strategic vision) while a Product Owner's job is to make sure those products are built right (oversee the design and implementation).