The importance of breaking up the Product Manager, Product Owner and Project Manager roles within a product team
Do you like to be called by your sibling’s name?
Absolutely not! I can’t avoid sighing and rolling my eyes every time someone calls me by the name of one of my siblings. Especially coming from my parents. Goshh!
The same happens to me when someone confuses a Product Manager, a Product Owner and a Project Manager. But when I say “someone” I don’t mean a person unrelated to the role or a professional just getting started. Think about it for a second. Who could really be a homonym for my parents in this case? Well, I’m thinking it’s tech companies themselves!! And these companies are run by techy humans, so you do the math.
I believe a lot of companies not only confuse these terms and professions, but still forget the importance of distinguishing between them. Understanding the differences allows companies and workers to develop a career path and build an adequate product team culture within an organization. Knowing who you are allows you to grow and set clear responsibilities for yourself and within your team. For me, that translates into focusing on what should matter to you.
At the end of the day, it isn’t silly that companies mess up a little bit with their job descriptions and job responsibilities, because ultimately, there are overlapping skills among them. Moreover, you might play more than one of these roles at any given time. It’s a matter of breaking up these disciplines in order to understand it.
In ‘A Shortcut to Product Leadership’ I mention that when I first got into the product management world, the job description I had was Product Analyst. If I would’ve just stuck to that job description, then probably I wouldn’t have lasted too long there. And that’s because my responsibilities were way greater than those of a true Product Analyst. Even then, I really was a Product Manager. Naturally, with a different level of seniority.
A shortcut to Product Leadership
These are the main skills required to build a product team
medium.com
Should I add the Product Analyst role into this equation? Mmm, why not? Let’s do this.
I like visualizing these terms as if they were matryoshkas -or Russian dolls-. Imagine you have four oval shaped pieces, each one representing a different title: a Product Manager, a Product Analyst, a Product Owner and a Project Manager. Don’t give them a size yet.
Let’s get started
The Product Manager piece is strategic and outcome oriented. It concentrates on defining the vision and strategy of the product. It’s there to serve the users in ways that work for the business, look out for their products, but also lead and coach the team. The Product Manager also turns the strategy into action by letting the team come up with the ideas. Also, this role involves looking over the actions undertaken, while leading and helping the team achieve their goals. In other words, this role discovers opportunities and finds a way to implement them by focusing on actions that tackle those specific opportunities. It’s concerned with why to develop something at a given time, what is it’s value and how it helps.
Those responsibilities vary depending on the Product Manager’s seniority. Let’s picture that there could be more oval shaped pieces around taking the Product Manager name as well, and each will spend their time differently. The newer ones will distribute more of their time on tactical tasks and as they get more experienced they will migrate to more operational tasks and finally to more strategic tasks.
The Product Analyst piece is “discovery” centered. This piece analyzes data to make sure the right things are being done. Similarly to a Business Analyst, it helps find where to focus the team’s efforts by highlighting the customers’ needs. The Product Analyst can discover information from customers and users, competitors, proprietary business data, trends or industry. Collecting and synthesizing this information is its main responsibility.
The Product Owner piece is tactical. Actually, it appears in Scrum or SAFe -which is another Agile framework-. This piece defines the backlog -or solutions- and iterates and prioritizes it. It sets up acceptance criterias and is focused on the execution of those solutions along with the team.
The Project Manager piece focuses on the output. Originally, it receives what has to be delivered and manages it. Its responsibility is to bring an action to completion within a frameworked budget, time and quality. This piece’s sight is focused on the when and on making sure that everything and everybody stays on track.
Assembling the pieces
The thing is, these pieces could all be individual jobs but they could also end up being roles within a Product Manager job as part of a product team. So, now you may start to attribute a size to each piece. Don’t get me wrong; each job is important and treating them correctly will bring profit and benefit every company. As a professional you could and surely will thrive in a Product Analyst, Product Owner or Project Manager job. However, within a product team things can happen differently…
In a product team, if you don’t reinforce the product management basis to these roles, then they’ll always be missing that sense of reassurance (from a strategic perspective) that what they are doing is creating real value.
Why do I say this? I turned into a team person. These Russian pieces somehow symbolize the strength of a mother and having a tight-knit family. Yeahhh, kind of cheesy -I KNOWWW-. But listen! In that same way the characteristics within each discipline are related and together can assemble a strong Product Manager. Part of the main responsibility of a Product Manager inside a product team is to understand what can really make an impact for the business and the users and at what time. It all comes down to helping the people from the start to reach their potential and convert the strategy into clear objectives.
A Product Analyst, a Product Owner and a Project Manager within a product team can be engulfed in the Product Manager’s role. Depending on the company culture and structure, one can easily turn into the other and vice versa. If organizations understand these roles better, they could create clear career paths and implement a better product team culture. That, at a certain point will allow the people to start solving problems and satisfying needs in ways that will work for the business and delight users.
