- What's Different About Product Management in Agile?
- Functions of Product Management in the Agile Enterprise
- Dual Roles in Agile: Product Manager and Product Owner
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Dual Roles in Agile: Product Manager and Product Owner
In the larger software enterprises, at least, the responsibilities of the Agile product owner (as primarily defined by Scrum) are typically shared among a significant number of team-based Agile product owners and a smaller number of program-based Agile product managers. In various posts on my blog, I've described why this is the case. This dual-role approach is discussed in my series "The Big Picture" (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Phases of product management disillusionment in waterfall development.
Within the context of that big picture, the product manager operates primarily at the Program and Release levels, as indicated by the snippet in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Phases of product management disillusionment in waterfall development.
In these various articles and posts, I've highlighted the different responsibilities for these two roles, summarized in the following table.
|
Agile Product Manager |
Agile Product Owner |
|
Market/customer-facing |
Product/technology-facing |
|
Collocated and reports into marketing/business |
Collocated and reports into development/technology |
|
Focuses on market segments, portfolio, ROI |
Focuses on product and implementation technology |
|
Owns the vision |
Owns the implementation |
|
Drives the release |
Drives the iteration |
Mapping the Dual Roles onto the Framework
In the context of ZIGZAG Marketing's Product Management Framework shown earlier in Figure 1, the roles fall fairly nicely into the product lifecycle, as Figure 4 shows.
Figure 4: Phases of product management disillusionment in waterfall development.
In many enterprises, adopting this dual-role model has been integral to an effective Agile transition and has enhanced operational performance in both the business and technology.
Product Manager/Business Owner/Business Analyst?
The title of the person who plays this role may vary by industry segment, as shown in the following table.
|
Industry Segment |
Common Title for This Role |
|
Information systems/information technology (IS/IT) |
Business owner, business analyst, project manager, program manager |
|
Embedded systems |
Product manager, project manager, or program manager |
|
Independent software vendor |
Product manager |
We'll continue to use product manager as the title throughout these discussions.
Regardless of title or reporting arrangement, when an Agile transition is afoot, the person playing that role must fulfill the following primary, Agile-specific responsibilities:
- Own the vision and release backlog.
- Manage release content.
- Maintain the product roadmap.
- Build an effective product manager/product owner team.