A possible extension to the article would be to also include the project manager and compare to the product owner. For many people, they are the same. For me, the focus of the two is completely different (process vs product).
Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
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Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#32Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…
> the key thing a product manager has to do is get out of the building.
Well, no, that's the sales job. First being a product manager is different in every company. And second there is a lot of differences depending of the type of business you are working in.
For example if you work in Saas b2b enterprise you can easily be a very good product manager and almost never meet the customers nor the users [1], because that's not what is important for the business.
On the contrary if you work in Saas b2c, talking (or doing surveys) to customers is crucial. So I would say that your advice apply well to B2C, in which there is no sales people
[1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterp...
Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#33Don't want to be mean but this is honestly a very simple article. This can be easily summarized as :
- A product manager's job is to decide how to build the product
- a PMM is to market it
- a PO is just a role inside a scrum team
I don't really agree with that, things are much more complex in reality, the PM and the PMM jobs is very different depending on the company you are working at.
If you want good content on the topic, there are these two blogs :
- https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/
But they are very oriented toward B2C and B2B smb product management. If you want insights and are working in B2B enterprise, there is still not good resources on the topic, (I blog a bit about it, but not enough to be a reference)
Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#34That reminds me of the time I was heading the Product Management department of a large company. We had so many discussion about what a Product Owner, Manager, Technical Product Manager is. Their role. Their responsibilities. Endless discussion with much feelings involved about respect, ownership and so on. Nowadays I am convinced that a great company just doesn't need any PMs. It is way better to empower the tech and…
The challenge I've had with that model is that as a company gets more complex, having someone whose sole job is to focus on the business technology interface is invaluable as people start to specialize. It's often more valuable to have engineers with (say) 6/10 expertise in the business and 10/10 expertise in their technology domain, working alongside PMs with 10/10 expertise in the business and 6/10 expertise in the…
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Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#35The difference between product manager and product owner is subtle enough that it doesn’t make too much difference in my experience. What’s a product owner at one company is a product manager at another and visa-versa. The one with marketing in the title is about marketing rather than product management.
For me the difference is stark. At my last three companies it worked like this: Product Manager is responsible for the product strategy and feature roadmap. They spend most of their focus on internal and external customers. They report up through Product leadership. Product Owner is part of the engineering squad. They spend most of their focus on the engineers building the product. The PO works on refinement, priorit…
Threads on this topic pop up on HN every few months. To me seems pretty clear that in most companies the structure of the product team seems fundamentally broken. I feel very sad for people who do not see the value in having a PO or a PM on their team.
To use buzzywordy language, a PO is not supposed to micro manage the developers but to give them a framework and the freedom to move within it and to make sure the product is moving in a cohesive direction that makes it objectively "better", whether that is more sales or better customer satisfaction or whatever.
IMO The PM's role is to find that out and communicate the value of the product to the market and figure out how to do that.
I've worked at places where neither role existed and the developers led the show, this always resulted in actual customer needs getting ignored, massive misunderstandings on what issues were critical and which weren't, believing the customer was a high-income tech-savy 30 year old with a 15" MacBook Pro running Chrome.
If the companies customer is that, then great! But for most companies in the world that isn't the case.
Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#36Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…
Agreed. There's nothing like being in the field with real users. Ideally, you don't just talk to them. You watch them work. Observe, and gather clues about what will serve their needs. And when people tell you what they think they want, don't assume that's the product spec; treat that also as an opportunity to listen to clues that will help you understand their needs. The best products are designed around how people…
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Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#37All of that to transform developers and "software engineers" into stupid micro-managed monkeys, just good to write code. The worse is the product owner. Sadly the management world did profite of the hype of scrum to add this bullshit job but just a reminder:. It goes against the original concepts of Agile! In the original Agile the product owner is the customer, and the goal was to have the devs in direct contact wit…
I personnally appreciate someone making the rounds around all the stakeholders, booking meetings for me, finding who do I need to talk to to get a domain-specific answer, reporting to stakeholders on the progress, and more generally navigating the organization on my behalf. This stuff is just too time consuming to tackle on top of a development role, especially in a larger org. note: we are a product organization, no…
I suspect customer as product owner works really well for consulting, imagine all the billable hours
Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#38There are so many messed up implementations of Product roles/jobs.
Agile/Scrum Alliance just has the concept of a Product Owner (it is the same thing as a Product Manager). This is OK.
SAFe breaks up the role in terms of PM and PO. This is not OK. SAFe is fake Agile and simply the application of 'agile' labels to top-down, waterfall ways of working.
If you have both a PM and a PO in your organisation, I'm afraid they've had a drink of the SAFe cool-aid.
One last thing... a Product Manager/Owner is NOT a Delivery Manager.
Product should be responsible for the What and Why, delivery/tech for the How, When, Who.
Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#39Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…
Agreed. There's nothing like being in the field with real users. Ideally, you don't just talk to them. You watch them work. Observe, and gather clues about what will serve their needs. And when people tell you what they think they want, don't assume that's the product spec; treat that also as an opportunity to listen to clues that will help you understand their needs. The best products are designed around how people…
> The best products are designed around how people work, not necessarily what people say about how they work.
This reflects a lot my experience: People actions >>>> People words.
Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner
#40That reminds me of the time I was heading the Product Management department of a large company. We had so many discussion about what a Product Owner, Manager, Technical Product Manager is. Their role. Their responsibilities. Endless discussion with much feelings involved about respect, ownership and so on. Nowadays I am convinced that a great company just doesn't need any PMs. It is way better to empower the tech and…
Perhaps it works at your organization. I've been a PM where engineers and UX had no sense of ownership nor business sense. A PM's role is to understand what is important, how to prioritize, how to validate ideas fast, and how to avoid the tail wagging the dog (the tail could be UX, tech or your VP). If you have engineers and UX folks who can do this, more power to you!
This is a bit of a devil's advocate argument, but perhaps the reason engineering and UX didn't feel ownership was because you were the PM. Not you specifically of course, but if the role of PM exists, and the culture is such that the "business" outside of eng / design treats the PM as the owner, it's natural that the engineers and design folks won't feel empowered to take ownership themselves.