What’s the Difference Between a Product Manager, a Product Owner, and a Program Manager?
The Answer Will Surely Disappoint You!
Nearly every time I teach a session about product management, the first question I get asked is some version of “What’s the difference between a product manager and a [program manager/product owner/solution manager/project manager]?”
It’s not hard to understand why this question is top-of-mind for so many people. As the constellation of similar-sounding product and product-related titles continues to grow, clarity around role and purpose can be harder and harder to find. If you’re a product manager on a team that’s suddenly hiring a program manager — what does that mean for you? Is your job being rendered obsolete? Is somebody else going to be doing the same work as you? And, not to be tacky but, hey, who’s getting paid more?
When I started doing coaching and training in organizations, I did my best to definitively answer these questions using a combination of past experience and frantic Googling. I would say with great confidence, “Well, in most situations, the product manager is the person who’s accountable for the business outcomes the team delivers, and the product owner is the person who’s in charge of managing the team’s day-to-day activities.” Nods of recognition! Sweet relief! A specific, concrete answer!
It only took a couple of weeks for me to find myself working with an organization that defined these roles in the exact opposite way. As I started to give my boilerplate answer to this very same question, an executive interrupted me and said, “Um, we actually define it kind of the opposite here. After all, why would we call the person manages the team’s activities the product owner, and the person who owns the product’s outcomes the product manager?” Duly noted.
Since that fateful day, I have found myself providing a very different, and much less immediately satisfying answer: “It varies enormously from organization and team to team. Some organizations define the difference one way, and others define it the exact opposite way. Talk with the folks at your organization to find out how they think about the role, and what their specific expectations are for you.” Fewer nods, less relief.
In my own mind, I’ve started thinking about the ever-expanding list of “pro**** ******er” titles as Ambiguously Descriptive Product Roles (ADPRs). It was hard enough for product managers to figure out what they were supposed to do when they were just product managers. But being one ADPR in a world of eerily similar-sounding ADPRs can be downright brain-breaking.
Further confusing matters is the fact that many organizations are now putting multiple ADPRs on the same team. I recently heard a perhaps-apocryphal story about an organization that, under the guise of an “Agile transformation,” put together teams that consisted of a program manager, a product owner, a Scrum master, and… nobody else. (As to what this team was tasked with delivering, your guess is as good as mine!)
For ADPRs whose teams include other ADPRs, I find myself offering the following, similarly disappointing advice: “Sit down with your fellow ADPRs, figure out what needs to be done, and figure out how you’re going to do it together. Focus on your shared efforts, rather than trying to establish absolute non-overlapping clarity around your titles.” If your job is an ADPR, navigating ambiguity is always going to be part of your job. Ask lots of questions, work closely with your team, and give up on finding a single canonical answer that will make your complex role appear simple.
At times, trying to answer the question “What is the difference between a product manager and an Elite Agile Program Operations Manager?” feels like trying to answer the question,“What’s the difference between a unicorn and a megasuperpegacorn?” Basically, “Those both sound like made-up things, and this is a silly conversation.”
But I’ve found it more helpful to think about it like trying to answer the question “What is the difference between a spicy chicken sandwich and a hot chicken sandwich?” I might have my own thoughts on the matter, but you’ll get much more useful information talking to somebody who actually works at the restaurant.
