The Product Manager vs. Product Owner Discussion

It's one of these beautiful days where I have you here in person on my couch. With your dog. With your doggo. And it's very special, it is the last day before you actually turn older. Don't mention that Alex, it's a secret. Yeah, but people won't know, because like, I mean, these episodes are not like on the day, they're not live. So nobody knows when your birthday is. They can probably assume like what kind of star sign you are. Maybe they check my social profiles and they will figure it out. Because you're so social. Not even on Instagram. Not even on Instagram. You can always follow us on www.productbakery.com Actually, we took the website offline today. But you can follow this podcast on your favorite podcasting tool. You should definitely subscribe on your platform. You should definitely check out our Instagram channels or social media channels, which we want to be a little bit more active on. So follow it to see what we do there. And before you turn older, let's get into this episode. And I mean, this time, I actually have a question for you. It's a surprise. Sorry, I didn't tell you to come prepared. I love that. Yeah, I think that's always where the best conversations start. But I mean, it's something that I wanted to ask you because that's been raised a couple of times in different occasions, messages, and I think we never really addressed it. So we talked a lot about product management. I mean, you're a former product manager. But I think there's a lot of other terms also around, probably most commonly known also the product owner. Ah, well, in that case, I'm also a former product owner. There you go. So I think that the main question that I've heard a lot is what actually the difference is between a product manager and a product owner? If there is any, right? Like, I'm not sure if it's just like different titles that different companies use. I mean, you're now opening the box of Pandora, actually. But I love that. Yeah, I love that too. I would say in the classic definition of scrum and all that kind of stuff, there is a difference. And at the same time, I would also say on top of that, every company is doing it differently too. And the experience of the person doing it also affects that, absolutely. But I mean, maybe we can go down to the definition by scrum, right? Or like, what are the key differences that you might see? I mean, the basic idea of a product owner when it comes to scrum, is that the product owner is the person who is working closely with the team, and also involved in the whole development process. While a product manager is rather the person who is evaluating the markets, working out the strategy, and does a lot of other things when it comes to defining the product strategy vision and more. But as we all have seen, I would say, these things are very tied together. So I mean, as a product manager, sorry, as a product owner, I have to have a basic understanding on the markets and what we build. So yeah, I would say if we start small in smaller companies, usually that kind of product person, whether it's the owner or the manager, does anyway everything. But that's what I wanted to say, right? Like, I mean, you need both in a job. But it's, I don't know many companies where you have a product manager and the product owner running a product team. I used to work in such a format where we had many product owners, and I think we were six or seven of them. And then we had three product managers who were also talking to the customers, defining specs, it was a B2B business. So that was a pretty interesting, but also like, at some point, we realized, hey, why should the product owner not attend customer meetings? We have to be there, right? So and then at some point, we started switching that and everyone got the title product manager, because we were anyway doing all the research together, talking to customers and also working out the strategy. Which is pretty much what I know. I think a lot of the time it has been, well, the two titles have been interchangeable for the companies where I worked, right? They were pretty much filling the same roles. But yeah, I mean, especially when we think about the cross-functional smaller teams, right? Like that own a specific part of the product. It gets probably difficult if you then only have like, two, three project product managers across the board. Now I just opened also the next box, which is the project manager. Let's not talk about that today. No, but I mean, yeah. You like, if you want the teams to be autonomous, you need to have them there, right? So you wouldn't necessarily split them around. You're talking about the product managers or the owners? Both. Both. Yeah. And I'm struggling with that because it depends on many factors, right? If you have like cross-functional team in bigger organizations, I think it's sometimes valuable to have product owners who are really focused on the execution and making sure the software gets delivered in the best quality. And on top of that, having the product manager team that does all the additional work when it comes to product strategy, customer requirements, et cetera. And I think the success of that is based on how good people communicate and collaborate. And whether you have one product manager who works with a team and does everything, or you have a product owner and a product manager who work together, I mean, at the end of the day, it's important to have like a clear goal on what you want to build, what your customers need. And then at the end of the day, how you execute it is also depending on the organization, the structure, the development cycles, and I mean, I can talk for hours, there are thousands of things. So I wouldn't say there's wrong or right, but I was always a big fan of having full ownership of everything. But the problem is also that I many times fall into the trap of being overworked, started missing out things because there is still a lot of shit that you need to do, right? I mean, product launches, you have to develop it, you have to market it, you have to work with product marketing, you have to do testing, you have to make sure that the design specs are as expected. So it's so much work. And if you have only one team and one product, it's fine. But if you're working, for example, in multiple teams, or if you have like many products that teams are building or working on, you know, the more complex it gets, the more it's time to re-evaluate how you are structuring yourself within the company. That's my takeaway. Yeah. And I mean, I do also think that especially looking at the product owner's definition and so on, like, if you have like a very well oiled team, a lot of that can also be then passed on to the engineering manager and the engineers itself, especially when it comes down to managing the sprint itself, the tickets, the backlog and so on. I mean, if you remember back the times when we were working together, that was always my philosophy to pitch the epic or pitch clearly what we want to build and how the feature should work and then let the team organize itself and sit down together and break it down. And I mean, for sure, there was also the research happening before and we have together worked out the design and the design sprints. But at the end of the day, when it comes to execution, I'm always a big fan of clearly making sure what we want to build after everyone has understood why we want to build things and then giving the team the power to figure out for themselves how they want to build the new feature in the app. Because I mean, who am I to break down which screen should be built first? Right. I mean, the team knows better. So yeah. And I save also a lot of time. Yeah. And I think every engineer knows best. And it also sounds like ineffective to me if as a product person, owner or project, product manager. I need to forget about projects. We started like running projects also separately across the business where a project manager works. Well, I mean, there's also some good reasons for that. Like if you have like very complicated work streams that they have to be connected with each other. But no, back to the main topic. I think it is ineffective if the PM or the PO tries to break down the engineering tasks, tries to like manage their workflow and their releases. Because like the engineers know it best, they should be grown up and adult enough to take the responsibility and take the ownership actually like over the delivery so that the PM can also focus more on the vision itself and on what we should build and why we should build. And that goes hand in hand with the designer where a lot of the responsibilities are shared from research to vision and strategy. There's just an interesting talk coming to my mind that I was listening to at the product management festival 2018, I think. There was the head of product from Gmail, from Google, and he was explaining, talking about the engineering organization and they had 150 engineers working on Gmail. And then he asked the question, how many product managers do you think we have? What do you think? I know the story. Okay, you know the story. I was there. Say a wrong number, Alex. 150. Well, 30. Almost. No, five. So they just had five product managers, which means one product manager works with 30 engineers. And the head of product always said, whenever the product managers are complaining that they have too much work, they sit down together with the team and ask how the team can take over responsibility and get more ownership even, right? Because the product manager has to mainly focus on the core value that needs to be delivered and needs to understand the customer needs. And I found that really amazing. Yeah. And whether this is called a product manager or owner, that brings us back to the beginning of the conversation, doesn't matter. But there is one person who has full responsibility of the so-called product. But if I want to start my career or if I'm on the other side and I'm trying to hire, what would be the better title to hire for or to apply for? As a company or as a person who wants to get started? We start with the company and then we get to the person who wants to get started. Oh, that's a tough question. I think, well, I mean, let's say if you are a company, if you're getting started with a company, you need a person who is capable of doing both. So first of all, so I would say just from my point of view, I would rather call it a product manager. But if you are already kind of an established person who is right now restructuring the engineering organization and making sure that they have full function teams working, then I would maybe hire for a product owner to make sure that first of all, this process can be kind of closed and the team's getting ready to work together and to become the well-oiled machine you were talking about. Okay. Even though I would have said, yeah, product manager seems like the right approach as it's like bridging from strategy to business needs, customer needs to the development. Yeah, I mean, if you have like a company, as I said, that is just restructuring and you have already like a head of product or a VP product who does or who covers that kind of work, it's fine. Otherwise you additionally need to hire product managers anyway. But the point I want to make is if you are trying to establish a good engineering culture and good, for example, HR processes, it's good to have the product owner in place or an experienced product manager. But you know, I mean, this is the point where it starts getting fuzzy because I don't really differentiate between those. Even though many people do also on the internet, there are gazillions of blog articles and I think there is no wrong or right. I mean, you always need to make the check in, where do I stand as a company? What do we need right now? How overworked or underworked are the people? And how do you call it? I mean, I like the title product person. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that also makes a lot of sense in the context of our podcast, right? I mean, I think even between the functions, is it design, product management, engineering, responsibilities are shared and should be shared, right? As the head of product of Gmail said. And I mean, I think we can continue to make another episode also on a very similar topic, which is a product design, UX design, UI design, visual design and everything in between. But let's finish that first. Yeah. Well, any other questions? I think that's good. Let us know if you have any feelings or any opinions on PMs and product owners and see you next week. Bye bye.