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Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

177 points by DamilolaA 6y ago

DamilolaA 6y ago
Read other product management articles on my blog, damilolaa.xyz
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Closi 6y ago
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.
- fooblat 6y ago
  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, prioritizes the backlog, runs the sprint planning and retros, and is the one who can decide if a sprint should be broken. They also keep stakeholders up to date on the progress of the squad. They report up through Technical leadership. In my experience it is a rare person who can do both of these at the same time.
  - DamilolaA 6y ago
    Yeah. This is similar to my experience.
  - Maxion 6y ago
    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.
    - ako 6y ago
      Product Marketing -> communicate to the market the value of the product built Product Management -> determine from the market what product should be created, with what priorities, what releases Pricing could be either Product Marketing, or Product Management, or both.
  - Closi 6y ago
    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 :)
    - fooblat 6y ago
      This is my experience as well. You must always ask for a detailed description for these roles. I've even seen companies that have a role called "Product Manager Owner" with a vague enough description that it could be either or both.
  - haswell 6y ago
    > In my experience it is a rare person who can do both of these at the same time. I'm one of those rare people. I do not recommend it. While I love my product and believe in the company I work for, I've seriously considered leaving so I can actually focus on one thing or the other. For what it's worth, I'm a former full stack developer who transitioned into the product role. This means I have the technical skillset to translate for my dev teams. This is a blessing and a curse while wearing both hats.
- midasuni 6y ago
  In my company we use product owner and PO as it’s less likely to be confused with project manager and PM.
baxtr 6y ago
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 UX people. They have to have the ownership, the product role should be filled by one the people building things. There is no need for another role in my opinion and creates more discussions than necessary. It also reduces the ownership of other roles. My 2c at least.
- minitoar 6y ago
  Totally agree. I feel that product managers are the emperor’s new clothes.
- paxys 6y ago
  That is never, ever going to work. I do think some companies have too many PMs, but eventually there needs to be someone driving actual product development and making business & customer focused decisions, if not for an individual team then at least at one level above. If an engineer or designer is doing that then you are just wasting their skills.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    I agree completely. I was a lead engineer on a product in a situation where we did not have a real product owner or a project manager. While I could manage the team and organize work, I struggled massively to come up with well defined and focused features for us to work. I would spend lot of time talking with different customers and trying to move that into development, but I was losing so much time I could have spent solving serious technical problems. Having a good product owner that sees the big picture and can write down a rough specification of features would have helped massively and allowed me to do what I do best. On other hand, I was also in a situation where product owner depended on me to do his work. That is even worse.
    - 6y ago
hayksaakian 6y ago
Sounds like a recipe for bureaucracy and ambiguous leadership. I can't imagine this ever working outside of a tech company with fat enough margins to keep 3 separate leads on an individual team.
- rubidium 6y ago
  Not really. I work in a device development company. We have a technical product manager (understand what the market and customers want), commercial product manager (aid sales to sell what we have and introduce new products commercially) and product development lead for each new product. Dev lead is typically full time on 1 product being developed. Product managers are typically cover a product line. All three roles are full time jobs and operate distinctly.
- deleted 6y ago
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harryf 6y ago
Having 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 are. And that’s not to knock analytics, surveys and various other forms of customer feedback ... it’s just if you’re not directly talking to customers product development becomes an echo chamber of unvalidated opinions about how the world works. And there’s always huge and surprising insights to be gained from direct communication with customers... From there you have to sift out signal from noise and create product vision and priorities. Doing this PM function well quickly becomes full time and conflicts with the job of being a PO and working closely with developers.
- DamilolaA 6y ago
  I agree but how do you keep abreast of this best practice in times of COVID? Product Analytics might just be the life saver.
  - rodelrod 6y ago
    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.
    - dayvough23 6y ago
      Definitely not a replacement for watching people do their work but we've been using Cohere (https://cohere.so https://cohere.so) to help us watch what our users are doing and how they're working.
      - DamilolaA 6y ago
        Thanks for sharing this. Will definitely look them up.
dkarpezo 6y ago
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.
- RocketSyntax 6y ago
  I'd say PO isn't so much involved in determining the "what" to build, they are moreso executing on it. engineering manager is more of the team's boss
- fukmbas 6y ago
  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.
greatgib 6y ago
All 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 with the customer. It is not supposed to be an employee, with some management level, that tell you what and in which orders things have to be done, because he or she knows better... Now, the devs are more than even isolated from the customer by bullshit jobs in between. This is very sad...
- axlee 6y ago
  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, not consultants.
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    I suspect customer as product owner works really well for consulting, imagine all the billable hours
    - gowld 6y ago
      Only if customer is someone like a government who doesn't care about getting a result. If the customer cares, letting them flail and fail is recipe for heartbreak, unpaid bills, and lawsuits.
- johnx123-up 6y ago
  Also, if I'm right, even in current Agile definitions, Product Manager is a customer facing role (Unlike the article comparison chart reads)
- 6y ago
cgufus 6y ago
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).
polote 6y ago
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 the topic, there are these two blogs : - https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/ https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/ - https://svpg.com/articles/ https://svpg.com/articles/ 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)
- brennanpeterson 6y ago
  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.
dongavich 6y ago
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'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.
- gowld 6y ago
  > 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.
solidist 6y ago
ihmo pm: "watch this" po: "this over that" pjm: "predict this" I haven't much experience with pmms. What are they like? For those who are interested in what I observed in working with these roles: https://dev.to/solidi/what-is-a-product-manager-anyway-3pc4 https://dev.to/solidi/what-is-a-product-manager-anyway-3pc4
JCharante 6y ago
I don't want to be picky, but the job descriptions could be improved if they removed the gendered text. E.g. "PMMM: he manages the ..." --> "PMMM: they manage the..."
leonardteo 6y ago
Oh dear. Yet another article that reinforces conflicting messages and gives ammunition to whoever wants to be "in charge" of a product. No. This is not the authoritative model. It's written like this is what the industry has settled on. But you can design whatever model that you want as long as you're clear on "who actually has buck stops here decision making and accountability over those decisions". For Scrum adherants... If you are using Scrum (many claim to be using it but are actually using some variant of ScrumFall), there is a Product Owner role who has "buck stops here" responsibility in the team. The PO does a lot of the "Product Manager" (with revenue/KPI responsibility) and "Product Marketing Manager" (positioning/value based on customers) also. If you are going to have separated out people (Prod Mgr, Prod Mkr, PO), you must designate that the PO has the "buck stops here responsibility" in the Scrum team, and relegate the others to stakeholder roles who hold the PO accountable. For us, we've done away with the separate roles and said that Product Owners are Product Managers. They have "buck stops here" responsibility. Stakeholders hold them to principles by asking challenging questions: "Are you maximizing value?" -> show us the empirical evidence, etc. >> The Product Manager >> "These individuals are often referred to as mini CEOs of a product. They conduct customer surveys to figure out the customer’s pain and build solutions to address it. The PM also prioritizes what features are to be built next and prepares and manages a cohesive and digital product roadmap and strategy." This is the Product Owner role essentially. If you have a separate Product Manager from a Product Owner, they should definitely not prioritize what features should be built next. Maybe at a very high level they are identifying a market need and saying "Hey there's something here, team - next quarter please figure this out". The PO is responsible for the roadmap, backlog and maximizing the value of the work from the Scrum team. All the Prod Mgr can really do is to be a good stakeholder, do the research, give lots of good external market inputs to the PO and hold the PO accountable for delivering value. >> The Product Marketing Manager >> "The PMM communicates vital product value — the “why”, “what” and “when” of a product to intending buyers. He manages the go-to-market strategy/roadmap and also oversees the pricing model of the product. The primary goal of a PMM is to create demand for the products through effective messaging and marketing programs so that the product has a shorter sales cycle and higher revenue." Yes and no. Because the PO is so close to the product, speaking to customers, getting feedback from customers from rapidly delivering iterations (again, assuming you are using Scrum(TM) correctly, and not the bastardized "scrum" where devs are relegated to code monkeys), the product positioning/messaging/value propositions and pricing model will naturally emerge from the Scrum team. The PMM as a stakeholder is helping to figure out the go to market strategy, etc, and execute on it in their own agile team. Again, I stress that each organization can do whatever it wants. I just don't enjoy it when articles like this are referenced to as evidence for why X person's role should have Y responsibility, etc. It's teamwork. Everyone takes responsibility.
jtdev 6y ago
They’re really all just different ways to say “sales person”.
- RocketSyntax 6y ago
  sounds like your org doesn't understand what product really does
stvswn 6y ago
As a PM at a large tech company, I often describe the value of my role as this: we pay engineers a lot of money for their specialized skills. It is great if they can meet with customers, but that can't be 50% of their time, or even 25%. Even worse, they should not be spending their time communicating to executives via slide decks, writing documents for the sales teams, meeting with lawyers, meeting with other teams to negotiate turf battles -- etc., etc. Big companies need PMs because someone has to do all the "stuff." Yes, in the course of doing it, the PM gains some power to set the product strategy and roadmap -- by virtue of being the nexus of all the information -- but this is almost always done in close collaboration with the engineering team anyway. It makes no sense to compete with other companies for valuable engineers who can actually create software and then use up their time doing things that I can do for them. Someone who used to write code but now manages all of the business isn't an engineer anymore, he or she is a former engineer who is now a PM (or an executive perhaps), regardless of the job title.
908B64B197 6y ago
There's manager in these tittles, but if any of them has any number of direct reports (or worst, if the devs are managed by any of these 'managers') you are doing something wrong.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  A product manager is like a category manager in supply chain. It's not a people management position.
bookmarkable 6y ago
I served in all three roles, under many job titles. Every company uses these titles and roles differently, often based on the politics of the organization and whatever blog the hiring managers read this month. I won't miss it.
romenrg 6y ago
A very related difference is "Product Manager vs Project Manager". It may sound obvious to some, but I still encounter many people in the industry referring to Software Products as Software Projects, even though there are relevant ramifications when thinking in terms of Projects vs in term of Products. I recently decided to dig into that discussion in my post: "Software Projects vs Software Products": https://www.romenrg.com/blog/2020/12/30/software-projects-vs-software-products/ https://www.romenrg.com/blog/2020/12/30/software-projects-vs...
RocketSyntax 6y ago
Depending on where your product is in its lifecycle, you need to rotate between all 3 activities. You shouldn't be doing the same thing all the time. After a big build, I'll tell the engineering team, hey, the requirements are going to be fuzzy for a while. look the the engineering manager while I work on launching this thing w commercial teams, and figuring out what we should build next. when that's done, I'll tell the commercial team the same thing about my commercial support
jiofih 6y ago
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.
fukmbas 6y ago
Product Management is a total joke, it's just MBAs trying to be relevant in the world of tech. They're nothing but middlemen that don't understand technology and impose administrative overhead on engineers.
ragar90 6y ago
What will be the difference with a CTO?

177 points by DamilolaA 6y ago

DamilolaA 6y ago

Read other product management articles on my blog, damilolaa.xyz

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Closi 6y ago

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.

fooblat 6y ago
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, prioritizes the backlog, runs the sprint planning and retros, and is the one who can decide if a sprint should be broken. They also keep stakeholders up to date on the progress of the squad. They report up through Technical leadership. In my experience it is a rare person who can do both of these at the same time.
- DamilolaA 6y ago
  Yeah. This is similar to my experience.
- Maxion 6y ago
  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.
  - ako 6y ago
    Product Marketing -> communicate to the market the value of the product built Product Management -> determine from the market what product should be created, with what priorities, what releases Pricing could be either Product Marketing, or Product Management, or both.
- Closi 6y ago
  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 :)
  - fooblat 6y ago
    This is my experience as well. You must always ask for a detailed description for these roles. I've even seen companies that have a role called "Product Manager Owner" with a vague enough description that it could be either or both.
- haswell 6y ago
  > In my experience it is a rare person who can do both of these at the same time. I'm one of those rare people. I do not recommend it. While I love my product and believe in the company I work for, I've seriously considered leaving so I can actually focus on one thing or the other. For what it's worth, I'm a former full stack developer who transitioned into the product role. This means I have the technical skillset to translate for my dev teams. This is a blessing and a curse while wearing both hats.
midasuni 6y ago
In my company we use product owner and PO as it’s less likely to be confused with project manager and PM.

baxtr 6y ago

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 UX people. They have to have the ownership, the product role should be filled by one the people building things. There is no need for another role in my opinion and creates more discussions than necessary. It also reduces the ownership of other roles. My 2c at least.

minitoar 6y ago
Totally agree. I feel that product managers are the emperor’s new clothes.
paxys 6y ago
That is never, ever going to work. I do think some companies have too many PMs, but eventually there needs to be someone driving actual product development and making business & customer focused decisions, if not for an individual team then at least at one level above. If an engineer or designer is doing that then you are just wasting their skills.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  I agree completely. I was a lead engineer on a product in a situation where we did not have a real product owner or a project manager. While I could manage the team and organize work, I struggled massively to come up with well defined and focused features for us to work. I would spend lot of time talking with different customers and trying to move that into development, but I was losing so much time I could have spent solving serious technical problems. Having a good product owner that sees the big picture and can write down a rough specification of features would have helped massively and allowed me to do what I do best. On other hand, I was also in a situation where product owner depended on me to do his work. That is even worse.
  - 6y ago

hayksaakian 6y ago

Sounds like a recipe for bureaucracy and ambiguous leadership. I can't imagine this ever working outside of a tech company with fat enough margins to keep 3 separate leads on an individual team.

rubidium 6y ago
Not really. I work in a device development company. We have a technical product manager (understand what the market and customers want), commercial product manager (aid sales to sell what we have and introduce new products commercially) and product development lead for each new product. Dev lead is typically full time on 1 product being developed. Product managers are typically cover a product line. All three roles are full time jobs and operate distinctly.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

harryf 6y ago

Having 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 are. And that’s not to knock analytics, surveys and various other forms of customer feedback ... it’s just if you’re not directly talking to customers product development becomes an echo chamber of unvalidated opinions about how the world works. And there’s always huge and surprising insights to be gained from direct communication with customers... From there you have to sift out signal from noise and create product vision and priorities. Doing this PM function well quickly becomes full time and conflicts with the job of being a PO and working closely with developers.

DamilolaA 6y ago
I agree but how do you keep abreast of this best practice in times of COVID? Product Analytics might just be the life saver.
- rodelrod 6y ago
  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.
  - dayvough23 6y ago
    Definitely not a replacement for watching people do their work but we've been using Cohere (https://cohere.so https://cohere.so) to help us watch what our users are doing and how they're working.
    - DamilolaA 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing this. Will definitely look them up.

dkarpezo 6y ago

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.

RocketSyntax 6y ago
I'd say PO isn't so much involved in determining the "what" to build, they are moreso executing on it. engineering manager is more of the team's boss
fukmbas 6y ago
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.

greatgib 6y ago

All 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 with the customer. It is not supposed to be an employee, with some management level, that tell you what and in which orders things have to be done, because he or she knows better... Now, the devs are more than even isolated from the customer by bullshit jobs in between. This is very sad...

axlee 6y ago
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, not consultants.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  I suspect customer as product owner works really well for consulting, imagine all the billable hours
  - gowld 6y ago
    Only if customer is someone like a government who doesn't care about getting a result. If the customer cares, letting them flail and fail is recipe for heartbreak, unpaid bills, and lawsuits.
johnx123-up 6y ago
Also, if I'm right, even in current Agile definitions, Product Manager is a customer facing role (Unlike the article comparison chart reads)
6y ago

cgufus 6y ago

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).

polote 6y ago

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 the topic, there are these two blogs : - https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/ https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/ - https://svpg.com/articles/ https://svpg.com/articles/ 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)

brennanpeterson 6y ago
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.

dongavich 6y ago

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'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.

gowld 6y ago
> 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.

solidist 6y ago

ihmo pm: "watch this" po: "this over that" pjm: "predict this" I haven't much experience with pmms. What are they like? For those who are interested in what I observed in working with these roles: https://dev.to/solidi/what-is-a-product-manager-anyway-3pc4 https://dev.to/solidi/what-is-a-product-manager-anyway-3pc4

JCharante 6y ago

I don't want to be picky, but the job descriptions could be improved if they removed the gendered text. E.g. "PMMM: he manages the ..." --> "PMMM: they manage the..."

leonardteo 6y ago

Oh dear. Yet another article that reinforces conflicting messages and gives ammunition to whoever wants to be "in charge" of a product. No. This is not the authoritative model. It's written like this is what the industry has settled on. But you can design whatever model that you want as long as you're clear on "who actually has buck stops here decision making and accountability over those decisions". For Scrum adherants... If you are using Scrum (many claim to be using it but are actually using some variant of ScrumFall), there is a Product Owner role who has "buck stops here" responsibility in the team. The PO does a lot of the "Product Manager" (with revenue/KPI responsibility) and "Product Marketing Manager" (positioning/value based on customers) also. If you are going to have separated out people (Prod Mgr, Prod Mkr, PO), you must designate that the PO has the "buck stops here responsibility" in the Scrum team, and relegate the others to stakeholder roles who hold the PO accountable. For us, we've done away with the separate roles and said that Product Owners are Product Managers. They have "buck stops here" responsibility. Stakeholders hold them to principles by asking challenging questions: "Are you maximizing value?" -> show us the empirical evidence, etc. >> The Product Manager >> "These individuals are often referred to as mini CEOs of a product. They conduct customer surveys to figure out the customer’s pain and build solutions to address it. The PM also prioritizes what features are to be built next and prepares and manages a cohesive and digital product roadmap and strategy." This is the Product Owner role essentially. If you have a separate Product Manager from a Product Owner, they should definitely not prioritize what features should be built next. Maybe at a very high level they are identifying a market need and saying "Hey there's something here, team - next quarter please figure this out". The PO is responsible for the roadmap, backlog and maximizing the value of the work from the Scrum team. All the Prod Mgr can really do is to be a good stakeholder, do the research, give lots of good external market inputs to the PO and hold the PO accountable for delivering value. >> The Product Marketing Manager >> "The PMM communicates vital product value — the “why”, “what” and “when” of a product to intending buyers. He manages the go-to-market strategy/roadmap and also oversees the pricing model of the product. The primary goal of a PMM is to create demand for the products through effective messaging and marketing programs so that the product has a shorter sales cycle and higher revenue." Yes and no. Because the PO is so close to the product, speaking to customers, getting feedback from customers from rapidly delivering iterations (again, assuming you are using Scrum(TM) correctly, and not the bastardized "scrum" where devs are relegated to code monkeys), the product positioning/messaging/value propositions and pricing model will naturally emerge from the Scrum team. The PMM as a stakeholder is helping to figure out the go to market strategy, etc, and execute on it in their own agile team. Again, I stress that each organization can do whatever it wants. I just don't enjoy it when articles like this are referenced to as evidence for why X person's role should have Y responsibility, etc. It's teamwork. Everyone takes responsibility.

jtdev 6y ago

They’re really all just different ways to say “sales person”.

RocketSyntax 6y ago
sounds like your org doesn't understand what product really does

stvswn 6y ago

As a PM at a large tech company, I often describe the value of my role as this: we pay engineers a lot of money for their specialized skills. It is great if they can meet with customers, but that can't be 50% of their time, or even 25%. Even worse, they should not be spending their time communicating to executives via slide decks, writing documents for the sales teams, meeting with lawyers, meeting with other teams to negotiate turf battles -- etc., etc. Big companies need PMs because someone has to do all the "stuff." Yes, in the course of doing it, the PM gains some power to set the product strategy and roadmap -- by virtue of being the nexus of all the information -- but this is almost always done in close collaboration with the engineering team anyway. It makes no sense to compete with other companies for valuable engineers who can actually create software and then use up their time doing things that I can do for them. Someone who used to write code but now manages all of the business isn't an engineer anymore, he or she is a former engineer who is now a PM (or an executive perhaps), regardless of the job title.

908B64B197 6y ago

There's manager in these tittles, but if any of them has any number of direct reports (or worst, if the devs are managed by any of these 'managers') you are doing something wrong.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
A product manager is like a category manager in supply chain. It's not a people management position.

bookmarkable 6y ago

I served in all three roles, under many job titles. Every company uses these titles and roles differently, often based on the politics of the organization and whatever blog the hiring managers read this month. I won't miss it.

romenrg 6y ago

A very related difference is "Product Manager vs Project Manager". It may sound obvious to some, but I still encounter many people in the industry referring to Software Products as Software Projects, even though there are relevant ramifications when thinking in terms of Projects vs in term of Products. I recently decided to dig into that discussion in my post: "Software Projects vs Software Products": https://www.romenrg.com/blog/2020/12/30/software-projects-vs-software-products/ https://www.romenrg.com/blog/2020/12/30/software-projects-vs...

RocketSyntax 6y ago

Depending on where your product is in its lifecycle, you need to rotate between all 3 activities. You shouldn't be doing the same thing all the time. After a big build, I'll tell the engineering team, hey, the requirements are going to be fuzzy for a while. look the the engineering manager while I work on launching this thing w commercial teams, and figuring out what we should build next. when that's done, I'll tell the commercial team the same thing about my commercial support

jiofih 6y ago

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.

fukmbas 6y ago

Product Management is a total joke, it's just MBAs trying to be relevant in the world of tech. They're nothing but middlemen that don't understand technology and impose administrative overhead on engineers.

ragar90 6y ago

What will be the difference with a CTO?