“What do you work as?” – This is a common question I ask when I meet a person who is working in Product Management and I get varied answers: Some say ‘Product Owner’ and some ‘Product Manager’. So is there any difference between the two roles ? Are these roles interchangeably used in the organisations ? Moreover, do organisations really know the difference ?

Many companies that I see, at least from the region that I work in, have a misconception between these two roles, or should I say job titles ? There is a lot of online content that you will find explaining the difference and I would just add here what I think is the difference between the two.

They are not the same

From my perspective, these two are not the same roles. It is possible that one person does both the jobs to some extent but certainly ‘Product Owner‘ and ‘Product Manager‘ cannot be considered the same. For starters, I consider ‘Product Owner‘ as a team role in an agile set up whereas ‘Product Manager’ to be a job title. That is why depending on the team size, product managing responsibility and the size of the organisation, it can be done by a single person or it is possible that both roles are done by different people.

Realm of responsibilities differ 

Product Manager is the visionary whereas Product Owner is executioner. Product Owner owns the execution of the solution and Product Manager owns the problem. Please note that it is the execution part of solution that is owned by the product owner, the solution is always owned by the engineering team (i.e. the ‘how’ of the problem-solution set). With this into consideration, the responsibilities that Product Owner/Product Manager carries get different.

Product Owners, being a part of an agile team, are and need to be close to the engineering team. They are the one responsible to understand the requirements/feature sets required to be built into a product. They specify all the nitty gritty details required for the perfect execution of the solution. They keep track of the sprints (in Scrum). They make sure that development team has a free runway to develop the solutions. They bring all the parties involved together to rally behind them in order to provide the solution that the market needs. These are the individuals who are tech savvy and also have a taste of the market to certain extent. To me, Product Owners are operational, analysts – Getting things done !

Product Managers, on the other hand, define the future of the product. They are tasked with the responsibility of: Product Differentiation, Segmentation, Product Pricing, New Product Assessments, Competitive Benchmarking, Product Communication and all the business aspects that comes with the product. They define the product, they decide what needs to be done and what need NOT be done. They drive the product roadmap and thus have massive impact of the goals of the organisation.

As you can see, there is a clear difference in the responsibilities a Product Owner has against the responsibilities a Product Manager has.

Market/Customer Knowledge differ

I consider Product Managers to be the champions of market they play in. These are the individuals who have a strong understanding of their market and thus customer behaviour. They are always on the top of what are the new trends in the market, changing customer preferences and thus strategise to lead the direction of their product evolvement.

Product owners need not be true domain experts of the market. For them, it is enough if they have a good understanding of the business and market they work in. This is especially beneficial when defining solutions that are user/customer centric. But a deep expertise of market is not required for product owners to function to their best levels.

Strategist vs Tactical

Product Managers are strategists! They have the vision of what the product should look like in a long term time-span and thus strategise the development of their product/s along those lines. They are responsible for the roadmap creation: what features to include, what to prioritize – it is PM’s responsibility. They take care of the P&L of the products and thus are tasked to get the funds allocated for required resources from the executive team. They channel all their energies to the success of their products and hence play all kinds of different hats to communicate with different departments.

Product owners are tactical! They are shrewd enough to get the tasks done and delivered. They are the voice of customers for engineers. They plan the sprint, own the backlog, plan the delivery and do all the tactical stuff involved to ensure smooth delivery. According to me, they are similar to ‘Project Managers‘ or rather ‘Product-Project Managers‘ !