With so many job titles bandied about these days - tech evangelist, brand warrior, code ninja - it can be difficult to tell what’s a ‘real job’ and what’s simply another name for a job that already exists. Product Manager and Product Owner are two job titles that sound very similar, yet have unique differences.
Make sure that you are hiring for the right role (or applying for a role you’re suitably experienced for) by learning the difference between the two here.
What is a Product Manager?
A product manager is the person who develops a strategic product plan from verified and validated customer research, checking back and refining along the way, pulling together the right resources with a mix of business and technical skills. They are data gatherers, excellent communicators, and seekers of true customer data.
Product Managers are data-driven communicators and organisers.
It’s their job to ensure they’ve done all the research and pulled together the right team and elements to make sure a product is profitable. They are there to ensure corporate goals are met, the right product is developed, and everyone on the project is on the same page.
A Product Manager is:
- Highly adept at communication across all levels of stakeholders, including the customer
- Seen by others as influential, knowledgeable, and organised
- Very good with numbers and business intelligence products
- Technically proficient enough to understand the product and process
- Excellent at bringing the right people together to work on a project
- A master of market research
All about the Product Owner
The Product Owner in a project is the person you can consider the customer advocate. They’re concerned with building the product that is going to impress the customer, solving a particular pain pain in their lives. They’re less concerned about numbers and more concerned about making sure the product and the customer are in symbiosis.
Product Owners are customer-driven communicators and organisers.
Traditionally, in Agile development, Product Owner is the role you play on the Scrum team to facilitate the passage of User Stories into product features, prioritising the important bits. However, Scrum isn’t necessary to inhabit this role. It’s all about strategic decision making across the development process, whether it be in the requirements gathering phase, during development, or even in ongoing support. Creating User Stories is a key part of this role.
A Product Owner has a firm grasp of:
- Market/customer research, passed on from the Project Manager
- Excellent communication with stakeholders of all levels
- Positivity within the product cycle
- Some degree of technical understanding
- Management of user stories, liaising with stakeholders and development
- Management of which user stories to prioritise in development
- High degree of reasoning skills to quickly learn which user stories require what attention (and approximate timeline forecasting), driven by quantitative historical data
- Management of stakeholder expectations
(Abridged from Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell)
Product Managers straddle the psychology side of the product puzzle far more than the technical side, understanding what customers want. However, it’s important that a Product Manager has some degree of the technical requirements of projects, so they can be comfortable in decision-making processes as well as know when to compromise on various project points.
Key differences
A Product Manager requires a lot more experience in the field, as well as a data-driven background, to be successful in the role. A Product Owner can be an experienced software developer who is also a great communicator. A Product Manager has a lot more responsibilities to attend to (or assign) than a Product Owner will. Both are important roles to have within a project, however they are both quite different.
If you are looking to hire a Product Manager or Product Owner for your software project, then get in touch with us at CodeFirst . We have plenty of experience within the team across a range of software roles and you might just find the perfect fit for your next project.