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So much snake oil. So many people have “shifted from product owner to product management“, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who can tell me the difference.

by zingar 4y ago

VinLucero 4y ago
Fair discourse: I have worked at Google, Credit Karma and now Sivo (YC W21) as a (technical) program and product manager. I know for a fact that Google doesn’t actually have “Product Owner” as a role in their org chart. At Google, the separation is: Product Manager (Vision), which is focused on gathering business needs and driving the Feature Roadmap. Program Manager (Execution), which focuses on finding ways to unblock delivery of the vision with cross-functional teams, such as getting designs, legal approvals, etc. I recently experienced a Product Owner for the first time when hiring one at Sivo (YC W21). It seems like Product Owners exist to accelerate the Roadmap vision into Epics and Stories in solutions like JIRA so product visions are more actionable by engineering. Similarly, while not a role at Google, I have heard that some MegaCorps will have “project managers” that often report up into Program Managers. This is similar to the product owner and product manager relationship. Hope that helps!
- ketzo 4y ago
  How do Engineering Managers work alongside those two roles?
  - singron 4y ago
    This is how you end up with 8 bosses like in office space. EM, TL, ATL, PM, PgM are all telling you what to do and asking for status updates. I wish there was someone to liase and multiplex all that, but I think they all think that's what their job is.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      > I wish there was someone to liase and multiplex all that In theory, that is the EM’s job.
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    The Product person spends all their time understanding the market and figuring what to build, who to target, how to work with marketing/sales, how to price it, what the competition is doing, syncing with other PMs to make sure everything is coherent, communicating around the org to people who need to know, answering questions from legal/accounting/sales etc. The engineering manager can focus on how to build it, who should work on what, engineer's careers, technical challenges, team stuff and many other things depending on the circumstances, and the program manager can project manage, focus on syncing eng efforts across teams, moving blockers etc. Those three things are an enormous amount of work, each one. If anyone tries to do more than one they will suck. There are exceptions... some people are able to pull it off. Those people should go start a company and not be PMs. At least in my experience, good engineering managers had a lot of input into the product function because they were paying attention to the customers and had insight into what could be built - part of the reason they are a manager is they have more than eng skills. The PM and EM need a good relationship and usually do, at least at Google. The program manager has less input to what to build. Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. Bad PMs annoy everyone and give the function a bad rep, good PMs come in and are treated poorly (due to bad function rep) or have silly expectations put on them due to a lack of understanding of the function, and leave.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. If the best product managers are at google, then that's very damning, given that Google are notorious for having awful product sense. I'm not convinced that's true though. I've worked with good product people at small companies.
      - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        I'm not saying that - I'm saying the job and whole situation around it is pretty awful, for everyone, outside Google. And it's a sweeping generalization. There are obviously going to be pockets where the opposite is true. That said - I don't think Google PMs are notorious for having awful product sense. They do seem to get hired at a lot of places. And product sense is a wishy washy term. If someone tells you they have great product sense ask them why they don't have a billion dollars.
- zingar 4y ago
  Thank you! That is the first coherent explanation I've seen. Reviewing these in the light of agile software development in the form of scrum and kanban: I'm struck by how close your definition of Product Manager is to the idea of Product Owner: a person who understands the interests of the users and the business and prioritises work in order of bang for buck. Someone who is really good with the 80/20 rule. It also explains to me why no-one can explain the transition from PO to PM: the people who think there is any difference did not really understand the PO role. Dividing work up, organising an issue tracker etc. are tangential activities that POs frequently perform, but they can also be performed by anyone else on the team. I'd argue that when you reduce the "owner" to the person whose only job is these tangential things, you actually hurt the team by taking initiative away from engineers. Engineers should be capable of organising their own work as a team, and should be considered junior if they can't. I first encountered the ideas of programme manager and project manager in the pre-agile world (from orgs that liked PRINCE/2). It makes sense to me that the programme manager role exists now in a larger team of teams of teams environment. The agile manifesto was about small teams and didn't really have anything to say about larger projects. A hat tip to scrum masters who seem to have been sidelined in the product management world, because their (no-less important, when done well) role was to unblock in exactly the way that you describe a programme manager doing (plus understanding people and improving collaboration). The main difference I can see here is that a scrum master was usually responsible for one team only, which was probably too little authority to compete with the ambition of product people and the disinterest of business executives. Hence no surprise that the role has disappeared. The "project manager" role isn't something I've encountered recently, but seems like what it always was (what you get when developers aren't/cannot be trusted to take initiative). It sounds like a more honest title than watered-down "product owner": these orgs never understood agile or product and just gave their project managers a new title.
acedTrex 4y ago
I feel like the difference is company dependent, but in my experience the difference, or at least the difference that is wanted is that a product manager implies a manager of both the end result and the process by which that end result is met. A product owner is someone who decides WHERE the product goes, but has no say in how the engineers make that happen. Its their job to set priorities and keep the product going forward but they have no tech management authority.

So much snake oil. So many people have “shifted from product owner to product management“, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who can tell me the difference.

by zingar 4y ago

So much snake oil. So many people have “shifted from product owner to product management“, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who can tell me the difference.

VinLucero 4y ago

Fair discourse: I have worked at Google, Credit Karma and now Sivo (YC W21) as a (technical) program and product manager. I know for a fact that Google doesn’t actually have “Product Owner” as a role in their org chart. At Google, the separation is: Product Manager (Vision), which is focused on gathering business needs and driving the Feature Roadmap. Program Manager (Execution), which focuses on finding ways to unblock delivery of the vision with cross-functional teams, such as getting designs, legal approvals, etc. I recently experienced a Product Owner for the first time when hiring one at Sivo (YC W21). It seems like Product Owners exist to accelerate the Roadmap vision into Epics and Stories in solutions like JIRA so product visions are more actionable by engineering. Similarly, while not a role at Google, I have heard that some MegaCorps will have “project managers” that often report up into Program Managers. This is similar to the product owner and product manager relationship. Hope that helps!

ketzo 4y ago
How do Engineering Managers work alongside those two roles?
- singron 4y ago
  This is how you end up with 8 bosses like in office space. EM, TL, ATL, PM, PgM are all telling you what to do and asking for status updates. I wish there was someone to liase and multiplex all that, but I think they all think that's what their job is.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    > I wish there was someone to liase and multiplex all that In theory, that is the EM’s job.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  The Product person spends all their time understanding the market and figuring what to build, who to target, how to work with marketing/sales, how to price it, what the competition is doing, syncing with other PMs to make sure everything is coherent, communicating around the org to people who need to know, answering questions from legal/accounting/sales etc. The engineering manager can focus on how to build it, who should work on what, engineer's careers, technical challenges, team stuff and many other things depending on the circumstances, and the program manager can project manage, focus on syncing eng efforts across teams, moving blockers etc. Those three things are an enormous amount of work, each one. If anyone tries to do more than one they will suck. There are exceptions... some people are able to pull it off. Those people should go start a company and not be PMs. At least in my experience, good engineering managers had a lot of input into the product function because they were paying attention to the customers and had insight into what could be built - part of the reason they are a manager is they have more than eng skills. The PM and EM need a good relationship and usually do, at least at Google. The program manager has less input to what to build. Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. Bad PMs annoy everyone and give the function a bad rep, good PMs come in and are treated poorly (due to bad function rep) or have silly expectations put on them due to a lack of understanding of the function, and leave.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. If the best product managers are at google, then that's very damning, given that Google are notorious for having awful product sense. I'm not convinced that's true though. I've worked with good product people at small companies.
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      I'm not saying that - I'm saying the job and whole situation around it is pretty awful, for everyone, outside Google. And it's a sweeping generalization. There are obviously going to be pockets where the opposite is true. That said - I don't think Google PMs are notorious for having awful product sense. They do seem to get hired at a lot of places. And product sense is a wishy washy term. If someone tells you they have great product sense ask them why they don't have a billion dollars.
zingar 4y ago
Thank you! That is the first coherent explanation I've seen. Reviewing these in the light of agile software development in the form of scrum and kanban: I'm struck by how close your definition of Product Manager is to the idea of Product Owner: a person who understands the interests of the users and the business and prioritises work in order of bang for buck. Someone who is really good with the 80/20 rule. It also explains to me why no-one can explain the transition from PO to PM: the people who think there is any difference did not really understand the PO role. Dividing work up, organising an issue tracker etc. are tangential activities that POs frequently perform, but they can also be performed by anyone else on the team. I'd argue that when you reduce the "owner" to the person whose only job is these tangential things, you actually hurt the team by taking initiative away from engineers. Engineers should be capable of organising their own work as a team, and should be considered junior if they can't. I first encountered the ideas of programme manager and project manager in the pre-agile world (from orgs that liked PRINCE/2). It makes sense to me that the programme manager role exists now in a larger team of teams of teams environment. The agile manifesto was about small teams and didn't really have anything to say about larger projects. A hat tip to scrum masters who seem to have been sidelined in the product management world, because their (no-less important, when done well) role was to unblock in exactly the way that you describe a programme manager doing (plus understanding people and improving collaboration). The main difference I can see here is that a scrum master was usually responsible for one team only, which was probably too little authority to compete with the ambition of product people and the disinterest of business executives. Hence no surprise that the role has disappeared. The "project manager" role isn't something I've encountered recently, but seems like what it always was (what you get when developers aren't/cannot be trusted to take initiative). It sounds like a more honest title than watered-down "product owner": these orgs never understood agile or product and just gave their project managers a new title.

acedTrex 4y ago

I feel like the difference is company dependent, but in my experience the difference, or at least the difference that is wanted is that a product manager implies a manager of both the end result and the process by which that end result is met. A product owner is someone who decides WHERE the product goes, but has no say in how the engineers make that happen. Its their job to set priorities and keep the product going forward but they have no tech management authority.