Product Owners: What’s your profession?
Versão em Português: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-owners-qual-%C3%A9-sua-profiss%C3%A3o-eduardo-silva/
In the above scene (of 300 the movie), a small Spartan army encounter the Arcadian army. The latter had many more men than Sparta’s army. The common interest is to fight the Persian invader Xerxes — with an army even more powerful. The Arcadian leader says he was fooled by Sparta because he believed that Sparta would have the same number of soldiers than Arcadia. The Spartan leader, Leonidas, ask a few Arcadians what are their profession: potter, sculptor, and blacksmith, they answer. Leonidas then asks the Spartan army: Spartans! What is your profession?
They answer in chorus with their war cry.
See, old friend? I’ve brought more soldiers than you — says Leonidas.
What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?
I’ve seen a lot of discussions about the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager, and now I’ll bring to light my point of view.
In 2011, Marty Cagan approached the subject and in 2016 he wrote again about it. In the first article, he said that many companies divided the roles, where the Product Manager was responsible for interacting with customers and stakeholders, and the Product Owner responsible for interacting with the Development Team and to manage the product backlog. His view is that this approach generates weak products with little innovation. His opinion is that the Product Owner and the Product Manager must be the same person. In his second article, he was sorry about his first approach, because he said that many people would go through a two-day training to become certified Product Owners (CSPO) and with this certification, they entitle themselves as Product Managers — without having a clue of what they are actually doing.
Melissa Perri, in her 2017 article, went back to the origin of the roles: while the name Product Owner popped up with Scrum in the 90s, the Product Manager career dates way back. HP already had Product Managers in the 40s, and lots of older Silicon Valley companies had at least one person with this role.
The Scrum Guide defined the role of Product Owner as “… responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals”. To do this, the guide defines the Product Owner as responsible for managing the Product Backlog.
Scrum is lightweight, simple to understand, but difficult to master (Scrum Guide — Definition of Scrum). Gunter Verheyen was great when he says that Scrum is a framework, not a methodology. The difference here is that “Methodologies are composed of stringent and mandatory sequences of processes and procedures, implementing predefined algorithms”. As a framework, Scrum describes roles and rules about principles to facilitate and help the execution of the work not in a less prescriptively way. Understand this difference is essential to understand why the two roles exist.
Scrum, as a lightweight framework, defined in its guide the “What”, without getting into the bushes of “How” — it only prescribes what must be done to create a certain result, but it doesn’t explain how the work should be done. This way, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland also didn’t go into the details of the Roles (that way Scrum could be used in most contexts). They only defined the Product Owner as the main responsible for the team’s outcomes. The Scrum Master as the responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum, and the development team as the responsible for delivering a potentially releasable increment. Scrum doesn’t define what roles the development team must have, and it also doesn’t define traditional roles as the Product Manager. It is what makes Scrum so democratic.
So, what is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?
In my humble opinion, none! Product Owner is a role that a person plays in a team using the Scrum Framework. If the great objective of the Product Owner is to maximize the value delivered by a development team, as the Scrum Guide says, how he/she can ensure this result?
In a simple way, through a product vision and strategy, with market research with sole focus in customer problems, communicating these and other information to different stakeholders (and customers), creating a plan to achieve the product vision and gathering feedback from how the users interact with the product, circling back to the previous activities.
Well, this looks like the work of a Product Manager.
In a Product Manager HQ article, the Product Manager should “… help to guide a team in discovering and developing the right product for users”.
Greek Wisdom: The lesson we can take from 300 the movie, is that we must use the right “tool” (professionals, in our case) for the right work. As the Arcadians in the movie, a substitute can execute the tasks. However, if you want the work to be done properly, the right “tool” will beat the substitute every time.
For some years I have defined my profession as Systems Analyst, mostly because of my degree. But today, I do the same job as people I met with lots of different degrees: Cinema, Accounting, Marketing, Design, etc. Systems Analyst doesn’t fit the profession of those people.
Product Manager, then, is the profession of someone who plays the role of a Product Owner.
And now, my dear Product Owner, when I ask: What’s your profession? What will be your answer?
