Are Product Owners & Product Managers the same thing?

Some companies see Product Owners as glorified backlog managers. Others treat Product Managers as visionaries but isolate them from the teams doing the actual work.

What’s the real difference between Product Owners and Product Managers? This episode explores the evolving definitions of these roles and highlights how modern Product Management thought leadership aligns with the fundamentals of Great Product Ownership.

Learn More

If you’re ready to amplify your impact as a Product Owner or Product Manager? There’s one more chance level up your skills with us in 2024. Join Richard for our December public Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop, where you’ll dive deep into key practices. You’ll walk away with concrete tools for vision-casting, customer research, backlog management, and value measurement—plus a CSPO certification from the Scrum Alliance. Use promo code, EOYPO2024, for a $200 discount!

Episode transcription

Peter Green

It’s spring time in 2012, and I’m sitting with Marty Cagan at Peggy Sue’s, a local burger joint in San Jose CA, and we’re waiting for our burger orders to come out. Marty’s in town teaching a Product Management course at Adobe, the very beginning of a transformation that he’ll later write about in his book Empowered. As we wait for our burgers to arrive, I’m telling Marty about what I teach in my Product Owner course, and he’s nodding along. We’re seeming very aligned in what we teach, even if we’re teaching them in pretty different contexts.

Sensing a potential ally, I explain to Marty that I’m going to start working with the Scrum Alliance to revise the learning objectives for the Certified Scrum Product Owner course, along with a few other trainers, including Marty’s friend Jeff Patton. I tell him that the current learning objectives are basically the same as the CSM course with a little bit of backlog management thrown in, and it’s not resulting in good Product Owners that know how to discover and iteratively deliver value for their customers.

So I’m excitedly explaining that we’re going to add learning objectives around product vision, and discovery, and customer segmentation and validation testing, and Marty stops nodding, and eventually puts his hand up, looks me in the eye, and says “If you do that, I’ll stop recommending that Product Managers should get a CSPO!”

Taken aback, I don’t know how to respond. And I start wondering, does Marty see the CSPO as a competitor that he wants to squash? He has always been a strong supporter of agile, Scrum, and the Scrum Alliance certifications, so I don’t think it’s a competitive thing. Just then our burgers arrive, and we eat for a moment in silence. Collecting my thoughts, I ask Marty, “So why wouldn’t you endorse a stronger CSPO offering? It seems like we’re pretty aligned on what should be taught.”

Marty wipes his mouth, and says, “Because they’ll let any scrum trainer teach a CSPO, and very few of them have real product management experience. I’m fine if their trainers teach how the Product Owner role works in Scrum, that’s a valuable addition to good Product Management. But I don’t want people that have never shipped real products teaching a certified class in how to do Product Management.”

That conversation I had with Marty 12 years ago highlights an important challenge, one that the agile community has always struggled with, namely that Product Owners should be doing good Product Management, but Scrum doesn’t specify what that looks like or who should do it.

Richard Lawrence

To make things even murkier, the way these roles are done in practice varies widely across organizations. Some companies see Product Owners as glorified backlog managers. Others treat Product Managers as visionaries but isolate them from the teams doing the actual work.

So in this episode, we’ll clarify what makes Great Product Ownership so foundational—and why it overlaps so strongly with good, modern Product Management. We’ll explore how agile practices, combined with insights from thought leaders like Cagan, along with some other leading voices in this space like Teresa Torres, Lenny Rachitsky, and Melissa Perri, are helping organizations converge on a shared understanding of what’s similar and what’s different in these two roles. We’ll share actionable takeaways for product leaders and teams, so if you’re wondering how to unlock the full potential of these roles in your organization, or if, maybe, they’re the same role, you’re in the right place.

Peter

Before we dive in, a quick reminder, that the Humanizing Work Show is sponsored by the Humanizing Work company. We help organizations improve their leadership, product management, and collaboration. If you want stronger results in those areas, visit our website at humanizingwork.com and schedule a conversation.

And, if you’re enjoying the show, subscribe to the channel on YouTube, like the episode, and hit the bell icon so you never miss an update. And, if you’re listening on the podcast, a five-star review goes a long way in helping others find us.

Now, let’s get into it!

Richard

OK: Let’s start with a definition. At Humanizing Work, we descriibe Great Product Ownership as:

Learning and communicating what to build, including who it’s for and why it’s important, in collaboration with a cross-functional team and other stakeholders, in order to maximize the flow of value through that team.

This definition reflects years of experience working with Agile teams. It’s not just about managing a backlog or keeping a team busy—yeah, POs do manage backlogs, and you want teams to be busy on work that matters. But it’s really about ensuring your teams can collaborate to deliver meaningful value by solving the right problems.

Peter

Rewinding to the early days of Agile, Product Management at the time was either very formal, with big market research efforts and heavy requirements documents, or a little bit “wild west,” with PMs kind of experimenting with different techniques that were more aligned with the complexity of the problems they were trying to solve.

Software developers and Product Managers in those days were facing the same core challenge–businesses were addressing complex, unpredictable problems with big up front design, which just didn’t work. The Agile manifesto described how to address that for software. But the most disciplined agilists were primarily using eXtreme Programming at the time, which was developed for internal software development. The XP approach was “just talk to your customer,” and that customer happened to be down the hall from you. It wasn’t until the Lean Startup movement began to take off that software and Product Management as communities really began to align.

Scrum’s Product Owner role had a relatively clear definition within Scrum, but as Marty pointed out in that conversation we had, it was devoid of any practical advice on the day to day work. We’ve now seen a convergence between great Product Management and great Product Ownership as we teach it.

Richard

Let’s break this convergence down into the three sections of our definition of great product ownership: Learning and Communicating What to Build, Collaboration with Cross-Functional Teams, and Maximizing the Flow of Value

The first part of our definition of great product ownership is “learning and communicating what to build, who it’s for and why you’re doing it.” One of our favorite books from the Product Management space on this topic is Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, where she describes how to build a sustainable, ongoing practice of customer discovery, enabling product leaders to make better decisions by continuously gathering and applying user insights.

Marty Cagan also emphasizes giving teams clarity on the “why” and “for whom,” and then empowering them to creatively tackle the “what” and the “how.”

Peter

Both Torres’s and Cagan’s advice to Product Managers aligns perfectly with Great Product Ownership. A great Product Owner is always learning what customers need, sharing those insights, and helping their team connect to the bigger picture.

The second part of our definition focuses on collaboration with Cross-Functional Teams and other stakeholders.

In the Product Management space, Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap highlights that great teams work together to focus on outcomes, not just outputs. And Lenny Rachitsky often emphasizes the trust and alignment needed between product teams and stakeholders. All of the Product Management experts advocate for a cross-functional team delivering in small increments and recognize the importance of collaboration with other stakeholders in order to do that well.

Richard

Again, this is central to Great Product Ownership. Collaboration isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s how you maximize your team’s ability to deliver value. Product Owners aren’t sitting in their office, isolated from their team writing epics, stories, and acceptance criteria in a tool– they’re working daily with the team and other stakeholders to learn together and stay aligned as they learn more.

The third part of our definition is about Maximizing the Flow of Value through that cross-functional team.

Modern Product Management focuses on outcomes—specifically, customer and business value. And all of the authors we’ve mentioned in this episode say the same thing. Great Product Managers are not simply trying to churn out more features, or knocking out scope planned months ago just because it’s in your requirements documentation. Instead, Great Product Managers and Great Product Owners alike are constantly adapting plans to ensure that every day and every Sprint, our team is delivering value, and they’re doing that in a continuous flow of thin, valuable increments, not big, sporadic chunks of delivery.

Peter

So, are Product Owners and Product Managers the same? Here’s our take: Great Product Ownership is Great Product Management. The difference lies in the context. Product Ownership is about practicing great Product Management within the Scrum framework.

So if you’ve got Product Owners acting only as backlog managers, they’re missing out on a huge opportunity to be strategic partners. They need the autonomy, the skills, and the support to operate as true Product Managers.

Richard

When organizations empower their Product Owners to practice Great Product Management, teams thrive. They solve the right problems, they create meaningful value, and they deliver exceptional products.

Peter

If you’re a leader, you need to ask yourself: Are my Product Owners empowered to learn, collaborate, and maximize value? Or are they stuck in a tactical role, just elaborating on tickets and moving them around?

Richard

And, if you’re a Product Owner, focus on building your skills in continuous discovery, outcome-based measurement, and cross-functional collaboration. Learn from the thought leaders we’ve mentioned—Marty Cagan, Teresa Torres, Lenny Rachitsky, and Melissa Perri—get inspiration from them. And check out the show and newsletter archives on our site, humanizingwork.com or go deeper with our 80/20 Product Backlog Refinement course and our live courses like CSPO and A-CSPO.

Peter

And if you’re struggling to make this work in your organization, we can help. Visit humanizingwork.com to schedule a conversation.

Richard

That’s it for today’s episode. If you found this helpful, please like and subscribe, leave us a comment, and let us know how Product Ownership works in your organization.

Peter

Thanks for joining us on The Humanizing Work Show! And we’ll see you next time.

Register Now

Last updated