Product Owner is a role that comes up in relation with Product Management frequently.
During my time at infinitylearn in a lot of situations I was a product owner as well as product manager. In-fact in the first interview where I asked the question about the structure of the team, I was told the team was focused on having each product assigned to an owner.
When to have a PO
By principle, I believe product management and product owner are different responsibilities which may or may not be assigned to the same individual contributor. From how I understand these roles, its good to have a separate PO in cases like,
- if the product is huge and if the engineering and design teams are proportionally bigger, it might be more efficient to have a separate PM and PO.
- if a product is market fit or ‘established’, it would be nice to have a separate PO making sure PMs get to focus on customer retention and growth.
- if a product development is to be outsourced, it’s good to have a collaboration between PM on client side and PO on developer side.
- if an engineering manager (EM) skillset has to be 80% technical and 20% sales/communicator, a PO helps EM focus on technical delivery.
- if there is no ‘Project’ Manager, its good to have a PO because project management entirely falls outside of product management goals but PO has an overlap
Responsibilities of a PO
My definition of Product Owner responsibilities would include,
- A PO ensures every single collaborator is on same page at every point of time. Same page in context of what the product will do, how it will do it, the impact it will deliver, and its long term vision.
- A PO tracks the project themselves or ensures its being tracked by a project manager
- A PO understands the users (as defined by the PM), can get in their shoes, and can make product decisions alongside PM in solving the user problems
- A PO understands PRD received from PMs, help them improve the PRDs, and translate them to User Stories with Acceptance Criteria for engineering consumption
- A PO should do User Acceptance Testing (UAT) themselves, ensuring the product only goes further into deployment cycles once all Acceptance Criteria are met
- A PO collaborates with PM post deployment to fix bugs, analyse impact, and plan the future roadmap
- A PO collaborates with EM to ensure every engineering and design team member is aware of their tasks and queries are clear on day to day basis
PO vs Product Manager
For me, a PM should spend more time thinking on what is going to be required in the future and convince people to build for that future. A PO on the other hand does not have to obsess about predicting what would happen in future, but instead when onboarded onto a vision, help polish that vision, assist with planning and own delivery of quality product as imagined.
I have written more on what PM means to me here: My non textbookish definition of Product Management
PO vs Project Manager
I believe there is an overlap when it comes to project tracking and delivery responsibilities. But I would imagine Project Management would be more specialised towards knowing best frameworks on how to manage people, on time delivery and cost optimisations.
A PO can be a fair project manager but not likely an top performing one.
PO vs Engineering Manager
I believe an EM should focus 80% of technicals including system design and making sure what is built is gonna deliver what is expected - they have a full responsibility on how a problem should be solved. A PO or even PM can only suggest or counter an EMs solution - but should not or cannot have their own solution.
20% of an EM role has to be sales or communication and convincing. However even this can be offloaded to a PO or PM depending on what is expected from the team.
If I had to define this role in a single summarised sentence, it would be
the one who makes the vision come true through in-depth study of users, their problems, solution alignment, and focus on planning