Product Manager vs Product Owner - are they different?

[Music] hello everyone and welcome my name is diego granados and i'm a product manager in today's video i'm going to talk about the difference between product managers and product owners and if you're confused about these two roles don't worry you're definitely not alone at the end of this video if you're interested in the role of a product owner i definitely recommend that you check websites like scrum.org where you'll find more documents training and certifications so product managers and product owners are they the same is there any overlap in their responsibilities do they typically work together in a team let's find out [Music] [Music] product owner is a role that exists within the agile development framework more specifically within a scrum team the product owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the scrum team and how this is done is going to change depending on the type of organization the scrum teams and even the individuals on the team but when you look closely at the product owner role they are responsible for effectively managing the product backlog developing and explicitly communicating the product goal creating and clearly communicating product backlog items ordering product backlog items and ensuring the product backlog is transparent visible and understood now what exactly do all of this means let's talk about the team and how the product owner role fits within a team a team of developers using agile will ship updates or stories every sprint you can think of a sprint as two or three weeks cycle these stories are shown to customers to not only show progress but also get feedback from them and while you show these new stories to customers they will also give you more ideas and their wishlist will just continue growing as you can imagine it's impossible to do everything they wish for now imagine for a moment that we have a team of developers who can complete 5 stories every sprint don't worry for now about the concept of a story think that it is a unit of work something that your team can complete in less than one sprint and this team has reached a point where they can complete 5 stories every sprint if you give them one more they will not be able to complete that extra one customers most likely will be sharing plenty of feedback all the time resulting in the team creating stories which will probably exceed the five stories per sprint that the team can currently handle it doesn't matter how many stories you give to your team each sprint if they can only take five that's all they'll produce as an output pretend for a moment that you want to make coffee but you want to make the machine go faster so you decide to add more and more coffee as the input your machine regardless of the amount in the input is going to produce the coffee at the same rate and soon you will end up with a clutter backlog full of stories that could take the team months or years to complete however are all of those stories worth it should the team pursue all of them even if it takes them a year to complete and this is where the product owner comes into play the job of the product owner is to effectively manage the product backlog this means that product owners have to decide which store is going to the backlog and which stories are not worth pursuing and saying no to a story is harder than what you think and to those stories to which the product owner says yes they also have to be prioritized or ordered so that the team knows what set of stories five in this example will go into the next sprint do the product owners do this alone not really they have to create communication channels and coordinate with the team stakeholders and customers to make these decisions and priorities and there are other details that go into making these decisions product owners will have a sense of the value and importance of the stories for example however at a high level that's what they do with the backlog in fact according to the scrum guide product owners may delegate the responsibility of managing the backlog perhaps as the team grows but they remain accountable for it but that's not the only thing they do product owners don't simply push a list of features to the team just like that communication is key to their success they make sure the team and stakeholders understand the vision and that the feedback loop is completed customers share feedback the development team gets a groomed backlog and customers see product or feature updates constantly remember we're talking about agile here and what else the product owners do well i won't get into too many details here product owners can help the team to analyze risk technology considerations and trade-offs with budgets and time considerations product owners become the experts and the guardians of the backlog as well as the team members that facilitate communication ensuring everyone is on the same page and if all of this starts to seem very confusing on how it's different from product management you're certainly not alone so why is it so confusing then well everything that i just talked about is sourced from scrum guides and their official documentation but in practice things are a little bit different in a startup the product owner might have all of those responsibilities and in all practical senses they might actually be doing the role of a product manager but when you scale the company the teams the stakeholders the role of a product owner tends to deviate from what they are supposed to do as the team grows and do a mix of azure with waterfall or other techniques the product owner is tasked to focus more on the team productivity or velocity cross-team dependencies and prioritizing the backlog of their team losing that vision of the big picture and what benefits customers the most or in other words they start to lose responsibilities and the power to make business decisions that benefit the customer and they focus much more on stakeholder management crosstalk dependencies and managing the team's backlog alright so how is this different than product management well i did a video on what is product management that you can check in this link in the corner or in the description below in that video i go in depth into different aspects of product management but in short product managers talk to customers create documents requirements business presentations work with designers engineering user research marketing finance and other areas to make the product successful make business analysis and work in pricing or licensing for products influence others to make products or features happen create roadmaps backlogs and prioritize them i want to highlight some differences between product owners and product managers product owner is a role that you do on a scrum team and product manager is a job what's the difference the product owner role exists within scrum if you take scrum and agile out of your development process then the role of the product owner does not exist and if you're a product manager and your team is using scrum most likely you are also the product owner if your team is not using scrum you are still a product manager the product manager job does not depend on scrum but the role of a product owner does depend on scrum at many startups that use agile and scrum it can be hard to distinguish the differences between product owner and product manager roles in contrast at a large tech company the roles can be more clearly defined but remember that the product owner role may be different and with reduced scope of what you can read from official scrum guides in the end it always depends on the company so after all of this if you're still confused about the differences between product manager and product owner in your company or when you look at the job description that you want to apply to most likely the company may also be confused in fact in many companies and especially in countries where product management is just starting to gain popularity they use product management and product owner interchangeably can you be a product owner and not be a product manager yes product owner is a role within scrum not a job you can have any other job and be the product owner can you be a product owner and then become a product manager yes in fact you can be anything else and then become a product manager being a product owner gives you experience with managing backlogs customer requests working with development teams it is just one of the many ways that you can get into product management if you saw a job posting that looked like product management but the title says product owner and you're confused on which one is it many companies still confuse the role of a product owner and the job of a product manager if the job description and the responsibilities of the are those of a product manager most likely you will be a product manager even if the title is different my recommendation is do your research before applying and ask these questions to those who work at the company [Music] thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and learned something new today best of luck in your upcoming interviews and i'll see you next time

Channel: PM Diego Granados

Views: 53,505

Keywords: What is Product Management?, pm diego, pm diego granados, product management 101, product manager day in the life, product manager role, what is a product manager, product manager interview, product owner in a nutshell, product owner roles and responsibilities, product owner vs product manager, product manager vs, product manager vs product owner, product owner interview, pm vs po roles, pm vs po, pm vs po ag, product owner agile, product manager, product management

Id: sRPxQH2MjII

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021