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Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

damilolaa.xyz

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Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#61

Post by mathattack »

polote wrote: post #52
mathattack wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say 1 salesperson in 20 has the ability, interest and influence to alter a product roadmap. The other 19 exist because of their competitive drive and ability to bang their head against a wall without losing enthusiasm.

In my experience 100% of salespeople will try to influence the product roadmap if it means they can sign a new deal

Yes. “What can I promise on the roadmap to close this deal?” is very different than “What is best for the roadmap?”

You can’t trust a salesperson to think about the broader good when half their comp is tied to specific deals.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#62

Post by polote »

baxtr wrote: post #60
polote wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is way better to empower the tech and UX people And who empowers them if not the PM ? I mean in theory you could say that to get a product, you only need a designer and a developer. But you know the reality is different. This is not a hazard that most successful tech companies have PM (except Apple)

Thanks for the comment! I know that I am putting something out here, which is definitely controversial. I was a PM myself for a long time... To your question: I think it is the role of management to empower the devs and UX people. To your point about Apple: Isn't it amazing that one of the or even the most successful company on this planet doesn't have any PMs?

One role of the PM is to close gaps between departments and make people work together toward the same goal. It is very hard for a manager to do the same thing. For a PM it is easier because he is not the boss of anyone and don't try to gain power over other's stuff. On the other side if a manager is trying to do the same thing, you will have other managers try to protect their department.

As for Apple, yeah they are one of the most successful of the planet, but the feedback I have, is that developers would love to have PM to work with.

The issue is not to have PM or not. Anyone company in the world understand the benefit of having a good PM. But a lot of PMs are shit and just make things worse.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#63

Post by notahacker »

polote wrote: post #58
notahacker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your product is B2B enterprise then your end users' delight at your UX might not matter very much, but you definitely want to understand the decision makers' interest in getting additional reporting/auditing tools and how much value [if any] they get from their staff being more accurate in using the tool...

The issue is most of the time the decision maker has no clue about that. In B2B enterprise the product is not a big part of the decision to buy or not.

The decision maker is usually someone in the C-suite or a little below it who cares very much about whether the system gives them the reports they asked for, whether it ticks all the boxes on the operations plan someone drew up for them, whether middle management are frequently complaining about errors, how much resource is needed to switch from service Y etc.

That's a different product focus from the end user (who probably finds the new operations checkboxes demanded by the decision maker a horrible pain) and instead of actually using it, their perception will be shaped by middle management feedback and some claims made by the enterprise salesperson about how much money their business can save from staff being able to complete X faster or Y being shared, but it very much is a product based decision. Otherwise the lowest bidder (or at least the lowest bidder with an SLA) or incumbent would win every time.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#65

Post by Closi »

fooblat wrote: post #13
Closi wrote: post #3

The 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…

I've been a Product Owner and been responsible for the product strategy, feature roadmap, backlog refinement and management of external stakeholders, reporting up through product leadership.

I've also been in a company that had "Product Managers" and "Product Owners", where "Product Manager" was just a more senior Product Owner, and the "Product Owners" reported into the "Product Managers".

All I mean is that - it's different things in different organisations, and what one company calls Product Owner another company will call Product Manager. If someone takes a job title saying "Product Owner" and expects that to mean they will definitely be reporting up through technical leadership, in the real world I think they will be surprised to find that's quite often not true :)

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#66

Post by baxtr »

k__ wrote: post #49
baxtr wrote: post #4

That 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…

I think, you're right. I'd even go as far as saying management roles aren't needed at all below the C-level. The problem is that many companies already moved their engineers and designers away from the customer, and I think this model only works with small autonomous teams that talk direktly with customers. Most engineers don't even want to talk with customers, they just want to solve what they think is the most impo…

Exactly. That mirrors my experience. Devs start saying things like “go ask the PM, I just care about code quality”

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#67

Post by brennanpeterson »

polote wrote: post #33

Don'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 t…

Capital equipment is even more barren in information.

It might be better said that there are sales, development, and operational aspects to product management. You can split this into a product owner, sales interface, and engineering interface. Or not.

Even b2b is very different depending on what the market is. If you have 10 customers, the marketing path is different than if you have 1000, or 100,000. The roles shift dramatically.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#68

Post by vp8989 »

rodelrod wrote: post #25
DamilolaA wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but how do you keep abreast of this best practice in times of COVID? Product Analytics might just be the life saver.

Product analytics may tell you what is happening, but they won't tell you why it's happening. To your question, I don't really have a good answer. From a B2B SaaS perspective, we try to complement analytics with a lot of video calls but that's not nearly as good as sitting next to people while they do the work.

It tells you what is happening that is easy enough to track and measure. Most empiricism in the business world is poser empiricism, people want to say they are "data-driven" because that is virtuous in our current culture but when push comes to shove no one wants to invest the time to do it properly.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#69

Post by gowld »

baxtr wrote: post #4

That 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…

How do 100 empowered tech and UX people build a coherent product?

Why do movies need a director? Screenwriters and actors and cinematographers and effects teams and all the rest are brilliant at their jobs.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#70

Post by gowld »

dongavich wrote: post #38

There 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…

> Agile/Scrum Alliance just has the concept of a Product Owner (it is the same thing as a Product Manager).

It's not, really because, Scrum doesn't deal with product design.

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