Product Manager and Scrum Product Owner

May 27, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Last week I managed to take part in a widely recognized product management course (special thanks to my line manager Mika Hoikkala who found it useful for the company to finance my long-haul trip). I am coming from the engineering/Agile world and one of the main points for me was to figure out what my new role was really about, whether it is more, less or equal to Scrum Product Owner (PO). The course was useful in this regard and here are my findings.

The course wasn't linked to any particular methodology, but whenever the methodology was relevant, agile methods were deemed as more effective. Still the parallels with Scrum in this post are my personal opinion, rather than what has been taught on the course.

Product Manager

Product Manager is a role to care about not even a product itself, but about particular problems of the market or market segment. It includes tactical activities, such as doing presentations and strategic activities, such as market research and competitive analysis; technical activities such as figuring out the release milestones and not so technical activities such as product positioning. Product Manager is a role linking sales, marketing and development, a role supposed to stand strongly in the what domain, hunt for facts and stay out of the how part as much as possible.

Product Owner

Product Owner is a specific role of the Scrum process. Product owner is supposed to be ultimately responsible for the success of the product and its return on investment. In order to fulfill these responsibilities, PO is supposed to communicate a clear product vision, supply his requirements in a form of a strictly prioritized list and ideally stay in the daily contact with the team clarifying the requirements as development team starts working on them. PO is also expected to stand strongly in the what domain and stay out of the how part as much as possible. How PO is supposed to figure out the market needs and where he finds time to do market research, communicate with the team and defend the project in the higher management forums is beyond the process.

Merging roles

If your company is solving not THAT complex problems, you know your market or a single customer well, than a single individual can indeed perform both the Product Manager and Product Owner roles. A more realistic solution for many cases could be to assist Product Manager, when it comes to the lower level technical details. The forms of assistance could be different.

A mature agile team with an experienced Scrum Master might be self-managing, self-accountable, self-sufficient and self-responsible enough to proactively help with creating the efficient product backlog and could figure out how to nail the low level details on its own. For example, a User Experience Designer on the team could be a good candidate for deciding on the report dialog capabilities after Product Manager clarified the underlying problem well enough.

With the less experienced team or when Product Manager is more busy with the customer/sales/marketing you might need to get a Scrum-proficient proxy-PO to care about formulating Product Backlog, grooming it and being with the team on a daily basis.

Your experience

How does it happen in your organization? How do your Product Managers participate in the process?

P.S.
Derek Morrison dropped a couple of links to his experience on making Product Management work with Scrum. You might find it worth looking at.

Picture courtesy of eflon @ flickr

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