The Difference Between Product Manager and Product Owner

Product managers and product owners both play a significant role in the development of products at technology companies, but these distinct roles are frequently misunderstood and often conflated.

Product managers are responsible for creating and managing a successful product throughout its life cycle, which begins at the identification of a market need and continues until the product is retired from the market. Product owners are responsible for only a portion of the product’s life cycle.

To understand the difference between the two roles, it’s helpful to understand what is meant by the full product life cycle. Before a product or feature is even conceived, the product manager interacts with the market to understand existing problems, emerging trends, and customer needs. The insights gained inform the conception of new products and features. Those concepts are then vetted, refined and prioritized against other ideas in alignment with company strategy. Once approved and resourced, those concepts go into the development phase, which has an entire life cycle of its own.

When the new product or feature is completed and tested, either a product manager or a product marketing manager is responsible for its go-to-market activities. Through the life of the product, while it’s being sold and used by customers, a product manager is responsible for assuring its viability in the market and profitability for the company. This often involves enhancing or upgrading the product over time. Once the product’s viability has run out, the product manager is responsible for sunsetting the product. This is an over-simplified description of the product life cycle, but it’s sufficient for this topic.

The role of product owner originated in the field of Agile software development in the 1990s. While many companies have positions that carry the title of product owner, a product owner is really a member of a product development team in the Scrum methodology of Agile. The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the development team by representing the interests of the stakeholders, prioritizing the features of the product, and ensuring that the development team understands what needs to be built and why.

Often, the role of product owner on a product development team is played by a product manager. It can also be played by someone else in the company who possesses a deep understanding of the product, its users, and the market. This could be a business analyst, a product marketer, a UX designer or even a founder/CEO.

The responsibilities of the product owner are typically limited to activities that happen within the software development life cycle (SDLC) when Scrum is being used. This begins with Inception, where a new product or feature is defined, and ends at Transition, the stage at which the product or feature is put into production and made available for use.

In contrast to the product owner, the product manager’s scope of responsibility spans the full product life cycle. While ideas and requirements for new products and features can come from a multitude of places within a company, they are ideally the result of insights derived from market engagement by the product manager. This takes place several steps prior to the Inception stage in the Scrum SDLC.

Likewise, the Transition stage of the SDLC is just the beginning of the useful part of a product’s life, but the end of the line for the product owner, who is not responsible for go-to-market, sales enablement or other activities that happen further along the product life cycle.

If you think of the product life cycle as a 12-inch ruler, the product manager’s scope of responsibility spans the full length. The product owner role’s scope of responsibility begins somewhere around inch 3 and ends somewhere around inch 8. In reality, a product’s true life cycle will have many turns, loops a steps up along the way, but the ruler gives us a good visual of how the roles of product manager and product owner compare in the product life cycle.

If your company is struggling to define roles relating to building, growing and managing products, leave me a note in the chat below or visit Align Product Strategies so we can explore whether we can provide some clarity and direction.

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See also:

The Difference Between Product Management and Project Management

The Difference Between Product Management and Product Marketing