product owner titles

I always point out that it’s a person at Microsoft who is the Product Owner and they are the client/purchaser/user. Your email address will not be published. Product Owner is a role you play in an Agile team, whereas a Product Manager is the jo… It’s not uncommon for me to meet someone who refers to her- or himself as a product owner, only to discover that the person owns a feature or the product details but not the entire product. The most common job title, this can span a wide gamut of experience, responsibility, and skills. Your email address will not be published. This structure should provide the right foundation for you and your teams to ask: Do your team’s titles accurately reflect their jobs? Ken Schwaber apparently chose it to emphasise that the person in charge of the product must be empowered and respected. Super Mario? You’ll see this specific job title for companies using Agile product development. First, we will look at Product Manager and Product Owner as roles, not titles. When I need to take a break from writing, I save the document. I am glad that you found the article helpful. Sometimes (and very often) the internal customer isn’t actually nor should be the Product Owner for this reason. Other things like the Manifesto don’t help either when they refer to the “customer” (from XP) and assume it’s the same as the reference to the “business” and Scrum’s Product Owner role. Our mayor problem is that there is only one DevTeam, hence we have at least three of those POs, but only one team. Title: Product Owner Open Percentage: 66.7% Duration: 00:16:15 Date started: Tue 15 Sep 2020 21:24 Date finished: Tue 15 Sep 2020 21:40 Print this page Feedback Thank you for taking the Product Owner Open assessment. The product team is led by a Scrum product owner who ensures that the right product decisions are made, that a valid product strategy and an actionable roadmap are available, who prioritises the product backlog, and who engages the stakeholders. Given that the collection of responsibilities of these people is heavily interdependent and nothing is mutually exclusive, none of them actually ‘Own’ anything at all. In many ways this is analogous to the Architect track in engineering (in contrast to the CTO track), and something we should encourage more. A platform owner owns such a platform. Specifically regarding different product owner types, I have a question for you! Product evangelist and champion; Product visionary; Market research guru; External and internal communication stakeholder; A product manager is thus the person responsible for driving the product strategy and monitoring the whole product lifecycle starting from market research, customer development and ranging to marketing and sales enablement. This is the senior-most product person in an organisation, usually manages more than one team of product managers, and represents product in the C-suite or management team. Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. ownership and introduce feature and/or component owners along the lines Trying to progress several products at once tends to reduce a team’s productivity. Problem for me is the semantics of the word ‘Owner’. If you’re someone who is comfortable with the “business side” of projects, you are probably the right person to become a Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO®). Feature Owner and Component Owner. Apply to Product Owner and more! The individual will typically benefit from having solid product management skills and from having successful managed individual products before stepping into the role. The term product owner is commonly used to refer to six different product roles in my experience. Product Management Job Titles and Hierarchy, "Product people - Product managers, product designers, UX designers, UX researchers, Business analysts, developers, makers & entrepreneurs. Job titles within the Development Team are non existent and there are no sub teams (QA, Architecture), hence there is no importance to job titles such as the ones you suggested. Frankly, I can’t see another option unless the development team can split into three new, fully functional teams without having to add new team members. I have been a Product Owner, though based on this information I was more a Platform Owner. For example, you could be a product and a feature owner on a larger product, or you could be a portfolio owner and at the same time, manage one of the products in the portfolio, assuming that this neither leads to biased product decisions nor sacrifices sustainable pace. Platform Owner. I will have some difficulty getting my client to change the role titles but having this model in my head helps clarify the value of the different roles encompassed in the Product Owner title. describe above. This can be equivalent in rank to a Senior Product Manager through to a VP Product, but the difference is they are not managing other product managers at all – they are simply exceptional product managers who want to stay hands-on and leave people management to others. The role is not called product administrator, feature broker, product backlog manager, user story writer, or project manager—even though that’s sometimes how it is interpreted. This is in stark contrast to the Scrum product owner who exercises full-stack product ownership, from vision to the tactics, as the following picture shows. Out of the six roles describe, the SAFe product owner comes closest to a “product backlog manager” in my mind. Another organization experienced a similar problem and decided to re-title Product Managers as Technical Product Managers. Nevertheless, the product owner is often regarded as a tactical role tasked with managing the product backlog, detailing requirements, and interacting with the development team. In other words, they … The responsibility may be extended based on the following responsibilities. Your password should contain upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation. Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:12:00 | Recorded on May 5, 2020. So if you’re tasking a Product Owner with the broader product management responsibilities, make sure you provide the training they need to master the full breadth of the role (and then change their title). A component owner owns an architecture building block like a user-interface layer or a payment service. A senior product manager does the same thing as a product manager but has a senior title either in recognition of their contributions, the relative importance of their product, or to reflect the fact that they also spend time mentoring more junior product managers. Thanks for sharing your question Jason. If the product owner owns a product and is responsible for maximising its value, then it is important to understand what a product is. Poor practice by PO in SAFe, though, can often lend themselves to being just a backlog manager, but good POs in SAFe (of which there are a few) work exactly the same as Local POs work in LeSS. It became a title when organizations started looking to hire product people explicitly to fill the product ownership role. Six Types of “Product” Owners Scrum Product Owner. Referring to people as product owners who do not manage a product and do not exercise the right ownership is wrong in my mind: It creates confusion and it sets wrong expectations: Someone who owns a product part cannot take on the responsibility of maximising the product’s value and achieving product success. How come? The product owner is the CEO of the product, of course you can label it differently but why? While there is still no one-size-fits-all solution, a standard is emerging from most successful product teams and organisations that can serve as a template for your own: This is an entry-level position, for someone who is brand new to the role. Are they clear enough that applicants looking at your open vacancies know what you’re hiring for and if the job is for them? You are right, of, course: A product owner does not literally own the product her- or himself but does it on behalf of the company. As you may know, the product owner originated in Scrum, where the role is responsible for “maximising the value of the product create.” This sounds like a text-book product management responsibility to me. To get a more complete picture of the Scrum product owner role, take a look at my product owner guide: A feature owner is an individual who owns a capability end users can interact with, for example, the ability to persist a Word document or to edit it. I’m curious why it’s the other way around in your post? When a platform grows, it may be necessary to share product While this is pretty clear, what to do with existing job titles can get confusing. The term product owner is commonly used to refer to six different product roles in my experience. Thank you for sharing your experience and question Joanna. The responsibilities of Product Managers and Product Owners vary widely by title and are often historic artifacts of a company’s heritage. I’ve been a longtime fan of your clear descriptions & thoughts, helping me take a step back to think outside of the box and always giving me new energy to keep on going / try a new angle. Replies to my comments As a PST, when I’m training and coaching potential POs, so many people take their experience of project management governance and assume that the senior customer is the Product Owner. It describes six common types of “product” owners. You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in settings. The... Scrum Product Owner. Having clear and common structures for product management job titles in our teams will help us all better understand our careers, roles, and teams. It might be better to focus on the product that creates the most value for the business, at least for now. This is hard to achieve when they are split across two distinct roles. In general, when referring to these responsibilities the two … Names like “Product Developer”, “Design Strategist” (whatever the heck that means) and more are made up terms that people love to apply to responsibilities to make them sound fancy. For a smaller product portfolio, the head of product might be able to take on the role. Thank you. In order to oversee development, the product owner: Works with the development team to identify, define, and organize the steps required for the next iterations. For example, I am writing this article using Microsoft Word. Product Manager: While these two titles get confused a lot, the difference is in the title itself - a project manager manages projects and project teams and a product manager manages a product, usually from a marketing or technical perspective. Word is the product. If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. Note that the choice of the name is intentional. It’s the good we do for the users and our businesses. The strategic product responsibilities are taken on by another role, the SAFe product manager. In … Don’t feel bad if you have discovered that you are not a Scrum product owner. Even though only one person is supposed to be the product owner within … 4,416 Product Owner jobs available on Indeed.com. Click here to resend. BY The following pictures provides an overview of the six roles, which I describe in more detail in the sections below. Please review The Scrum Guide on Scrum.org and take this assessment again to improve your score. Other times, I meet people who say they are product owners but who manage a whole product portfolio. Prioritizing needs. It shows how the roles differ and relate to each other, and it explains how you can effectively apply them. Most companies don’t need all these tiers of course, so it’s important to think about how this fits in to your organisation. I regard feature and component owners as members of a product team, a group of product people who collaboratively manage a larger product. Component owners typically require in-depth technical skills. A product is an entity that creates value for users and the business, as I suggest in the article “What is a Digital Product?“. I have based my description of the SAFe product owner role on the official SAFe documentation and how I have seen the role being applied. The Product Owner is the Product Manager, the Project Manager, the Business Analyst, the Designer, and a whole list of other business stakeholders. Product Owner, Software Project Manager and more! Since it’s still a relatively new role, there’s a lot of confusion around product management job titles, seniority, and hierarchy. The SAFe product owner in scaled agile is working across a set of products and aligning the scrum teams – whereas the scrum product owner is dedicated to one team/product. For more information, view our privacy policy. Career, job titles, product management team, titles, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-management-job-titles-and-hierarchy/. As with anything else in product, these team structures and tiers should be aligned with customer needs so that you’re incentivising and organising teams in alignment with your company goals. If you’re the principal owner of your business, so if it’s not a partnership or corporation with … Scrum has three roles: product owner, scrum master and the development team members. An example of a product What one company calls a product manager, another calls a product marketing manager. Tasks of the Product Owner . This makes it hard to compare jobs, plan your career, and attract the right talent to your team. Another key role of the product owner is to prioritize needs. Feature and component owners are responsible for maximising the value their features and components create while ensuring that this does not compromise the product’s overall value creation. But because it’s the most common title what’s important to consider is what product they manage – if they’re a product manager for Facebook’s News Feed and impact billions of users they’re probably more senior and experienced than a product manager at a brand new startup. The job of a portfolio owner is to maximise the value a product portfolio creates. Product Owner is a job role that came out of Agile and Scrum, and although many organisations use it as a job title that is interchangeable with Product Manager, it’s not correct. The SAFe product owner is therefore focused on the product tactics. Didn’t receive an email? But you can think of the product owner as an agile product manager, as I explain in the article “Product Manager vs. But the ability to save the document is a feature, a part of the overall product. This article helps you reflect on and improve the way the product owner role is applied at your workplace. You could refer to yourself as a shareholder, member, partner, sole proprietor or simply, owner, but you most likely want something more descriptive when promoting your products or services. I am glad that the article was helpful! Some states also recognize a third title, managing member. As its name suggests, a product owner in Scrum is in charge of a product. Thank you for sharing your feedback and perspective Tony. Ken Schwaber Continue here Return to Scrum.org Correctly … Product Owner is a role you play in an Agile team, whereas a Product Manager is the job title of someone responsible for a product and its outcome on the customer and the business. But as indicated, the ownership scope significantly differs and with it, the empowerment and skills required to succeed. If you decide to continue with three Scrum product owners and one development team, ask the dev team to work on one product per sprint. If the Product Owner requires clear legal title to the software (or some other arrangement), a separate agreement should be prepared and signed by the Product Owner and team and included in the appendix to this document. A gig got me interested where, instead of working directly with Developers & Product Designers (and being directly involved in user research), the job would be working with stakeholders & high level architects. Otherwise, a dedicated full-time portfolio owner will be required. Thanks for your feedback Matthew. The individual is responsible for maximising the value the platform creates, for example, reducing time-to-market of the products built on top of it or reducing development cost. While the product manager tends to look outward to the market and customers to determine what direction the product should head, the business analyst is an inward-facing role, examining internal processes, practices, and systems to determine how to best build and support that product. Don't subscribe Martin Eriksson has 20+ years experience building world-class online products in both corporate and start-up environments for global brands such as Monster, Financial Times, Huddle, and Covestor. It is also not called “product manager” primarily to indicate the level of empowerment and respect product owners require to succeed in their job. Thank you for sharing your feedback and question Uwe. In some organisations this is a hybrid role, where the Senior Product Manager is still hands-on with a product and also has some line-management responsibility for more junior product managers. Keep it up. In this way, it is more like a product owner. The feature and component owners own the decisions for their assets, describe, prioritise, and validate their features and components, work with the development teams, and contribute to the product discovery and strategy work, as the picture below illustrates. The confusion stems—at least partl… Hope you’ll find it helpful. In other words, I find the approach less suited when faced with a significant amount of uncertainty and change that affects the product strategy. Fantastic! What a product owner is exactly is shown in this YouTube Video from a Scrum-Guide. I appreciate you reinforcing the Scrum Product Owner role is not merely a “product backlog manager” as some others in the field seem to think. If there are 14 Product Owners, what would the overall PO title be referred to (Parent PO?). This is similar to a Director, but common in larger companies with more products and management layers, or as the most senior product person in a startup. The world's largest community for product people, built by product people. We have explored that this is a BIG job and VERY different from the role of the Product Manager. I’ve seen the SAFe product owner being described as a more cross-team/-product role than the scrum-specific product owner. In Scrum the Product Owner is defined as the person who is responsible for grooming the backlog, in Agile it was defined as the representative of the business, and neither entirely describe the full breadth of a Product Manager’s responsibilities. This is the agile part of the delivery. This is usually the case in the development, introduction, and (early) growth stage of the product life cycle. We often find the Scribe Product Owner role in organizations that are just starting out … Based on what you told me, it sounds to me as if the SAFe product owner role was used as a team coordinator or project manager rather than a role that owns the product details. This includes actively managing the portfolio, collaborating with the product owners who look after the products within the portfolio, harmonising the individual product strategies and product roadmaps, aligning major releases, managing dependencies, and helping create a common user experience across the various products. If someone is referred to as product owner, then the individual should own the product in its entirety—like Word in the example—and not just a product part—such as the ability to save a document. Owner and founder are two common titles that imply a smaller company. I suggest calling the overall product owner “chief product owner” if you want to continue referring to the site-specific roles as “product owners”. Let's be honest. Are there any other options than hiring more developers so that for each PO a whole Scrum team (PO, SM, DevTeam) can be created? I have also experienced people confuse the customer and product owner role, particularly for bespoke products. These usually lead projects following the Waterfall framework, overseeing teams and projects. Employees with Product Owner in their job title in New York, New York earn an average of 15.7% more than the national average. They have no reason to nurture the product, engage with stakeholders, manage the budget as part of a Scrum (of any agile) Team. Each site needs a Product Owner. Thank you for sharing your feedback and question. A portfolio owner looks after a group of products, and the Thank you for your feedback Dana. In many startups this is called a Head of Product but I’m not personally a fan of that title as there’s no way to promote a Head of Product – they’re already the Head! The question of whether the product owner role is good or not clearly depends on a lot of factors, including team maturity, organisational maturity, … Nearly 20 years after the publication of the first Scrum book, the product owner role is still riddled with misunderstandings. The software itself would be built by suppliers with their own product team(s). Limited Liability Company Titles. Product Owner is a job role that came out of Agile and Scrum, and although many organisations use it as a job title that is interchangeable with Product Manager, it’s not correct. While I have applied this approach in the past, I now consider it not helpful, as a Scrum product owner should own a product in its entirety. Product Owner”. Having always had the ‘luxury’ being able to early & directly involve dev/design, they always knew early exactly what the issues & considerations were, and there were so very few surprises & differences in expectations. In soccer we have players, with a specialism perhaps, but all on the same team. Do you have any thoughts on possible pitfalls & some absolute baseline necessities to have a higher chance such a constellation succeeds? If you can’t hire more people, you should ask yourself if you should continue to develop all three products. A product owner is a key player through each of the development events, including planning, process refinement, product review, and final sprint. Or do you need to rethink your structure to maximise clarity? The risk of the setup you describe is becoming a “distant product owner” or a “proxy product owner“, which is something you probably want to avoid. In smaller companies the difference between a VP Product and CPO isn’t huge, and the title is used interchangeably for the most senior product person in the company. Titles really are a mess in our business. I have seen all of these patterns as well.