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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

#111

Post by DamilolaA »

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.

I totally agree. Asynchronous communication tools like Loom has also been helpful as people get bored of video calls easily these days.

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

#112

Post by DamilolaA »

dayvough23 wrote: post #41
rodelrod wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely not a replacement for watching people do their work but we've been using Cohere ( https://cohere.so ) to help us watch what our users are doing and how they're working.

Thanks for sharing this. Will definitely look them up.

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

#113

Post by brightball »

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 tend to agree with you, but the hardest part is when it comes to making coherent decisions about priorities and direction. You've got to have an agreed upon way to set those priorities, otherwise it will just end up going to whoever the loudest person in the room tends to be.

I'm a big fan of the idea behind the Weighted-Shortest Job First approach but the trick is balancing the time investment to do it to the size of the decisions that warrant it.

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

#114

Post by DamilolaA »

madeofpalk wrote: post #47
bhaavan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Getting out of the building" in metmorphical send might give you view from people / customers you can visit. This is likely to be a biased sample, and unrepresentative of the true customer. Running A/B tests is IMO, a good proxy, to understand customers unbiased binary views on feature changes, and objectively better.

Talking to users lets you know what the problems are. A/B tests let you know if you've solved the problem.

True!

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

#115

Post by jiofih »

I hate the co-opting of Product Owner as an actual organizational role. It makes no sense.

The idea within SCRUM is literal - PO is the owner of the product. His function is to prioritize features and user stories, bridging the gap between business and the development team to ensure value is being delivered. They don’t write stories. They don’t estimate tasks or manage the team at all. There is no need for tech-savvyness, and it’s not a full time job.

The “PO” role in tech has become a dysfunctional amalgamation of an engineering manager and a product manager, who can’t do either very well.

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

#116

Post by mmcnl »

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…

The problem is that PM responsibilities require a vastly different skillset than engineers usually need. I completely agree with you, but these people are extremely rare. Also, technically this doesn't eliminate the role but it does eliminate the position.

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

#118

Post by fukmbas »

dkarpezo wrote: post #24

Project Manager is a manager, it's a role from a formal process (waterfall). Product Owner is not a manager, it's an agile role. You can't compare them directly. P.S. In real life PM/PO are almost the same -- as people usually don't care about following metodology. PM/PO is just a kind of team's boss.

I support 4 different software solutions each part of a different product team and each having their own product manager. PM is definitely not my boss, just an unnecessary middle man making the total cost of tech more expensive.

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

#119

Post by quadrifoliate »

ryandrake wrote: post #85
ako wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually any impact a salesperson has over the product roadmap is too slow to have any impact on the sales opportunity. Salespeople usually have more influence on the customers than on the roadmap, so they're better of trying to influence the decision making of the customer, than the product. Salespeople focus on their sales targets, trying to change a product roadmap is not a very effective way to reach short term ta…

Depends on the company. I worked for a small company that was a real clown show. Sales would come down to the engineering area and say things like "I just closed a huuuuuuge sale for the company. We need a product that does A, B, and C, now so we can deliver it!" And, that became engineering's scope for the next 4 weeks...

Hey, I also worked at this company! (and left after 6 months)
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