Product Management

Product Ownership vs. Product Management: Busting the Myth That They’re Separate Roles

Published on 1 August 2024

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

6 minute read

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In the world of Agile and Scrum, there’s often a misconception that product ownership and product management are two distinct roles. This idea couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, effective product ownership is fundamentally a form of product management. Let’s dive deeper into why these roles are intertwined and how understanding this can maximize the value delivered by your Scrum teams.

The Core of Product Ownership: It’s All About Product Management

One of the biggest myths surrounding Scrum is that product ownership somehow replaces or is different from product management. This misunderstanding stems from a lack of clarity about what these roles entail, particularly within the context of Scrum.

Product Ownership in Scrum

When I refer to the product owner, I’m talking about the product owner as defined in the Scrum Guide—not a job title or a role that your organization has tweaked to include additional responsibilities that have nothing to do with Scrum.

True Product Owner Role: In Scrum, the product owner is accountable for maximizing the value delivered by the Scrum team. This accountability doesn’t mean that the product owner should be bogged down with tasks like writing reports for management or managing projects—these are distractions from the core responsibility.
Misconceptions in Organizations: Many organizations mistakenly assign the title of “Product Owner” while piling on unrelated duties. This leads to confusion and dilutes the effectiveness of the role. The product owner’s focus should be on value, not administrative tasks.

Product Management: The Bigger Picture

Product management encompasses everything required to manage a product, from its inception to its delivery and beyond. In a traditional setting, product management might have involved long-term planning and less frequent delivery cycles—perhaps every couple of years. However, with Scrum, the focus shifts to shorter, more iterative cycles.

Scrum’s Influence: When adopting Scrum, product management naturally incorporates the responsibilities of the product owner. This means moving from long-term planning to shorter, iterative cycles, where the product owner is laser-focused on maximizing value.
Core Accountability: The product owner’s accountability within Scrum is an extension of traditional product management but with a more defined focus on value delivery. Essentially, the product owner ensures that the Scrum team’s efforts are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization.

Why Focusing on Value is Essential in Short Iterative Cycles

As organizations transition to shorter delivery cycles, the importance of focusing on value increases. Gone are the days when companies could afford to focus solely on output—today, the emphasis is on delivering meaningful outcomes that align with the organization’s goals.

Shifting from Productivity to Value

In the past, organizations might have been able to get by without a clear focus on value. Perhaps they had a product that was a cash cow with little competition, allowing them to rest on their laurels. But in today’s fast-paced market, this approach is no longer viable.

Value Over Volume: The goal is no longer to deliver more features or items within a timeframe. Instead, the focus is on delivering the most valuable features—the ones that will have the greatest impact.
Understanding Value: To maximize value, it’s crucial to understand the direction the organization is heading. This involves a deep understanding of what value means to the organization and ensuring that the Scrum team’s work aligns with these goals.

Product Ownership as a Reflection of Organizational Health

Scrum acts like a mirror, reflecting the organization’s ability to deliver value through its product management practices. If the product owner struggles to maximize value, it’s a sign that there may be underlying issues in the organization’s approach to product management.

Scrum’s Accountability: The product owner’s accountability is not just a title—it’s a mechanism that forces the organization to confront its limitations in managing products effectively within a Scrum framework.
Adapting to Market Changes: As markets evolve, the need to adapt quickly becomes critical. Organizations that cling to long-term planning without the flexibility to pivot will find themselves left behind.

The Evolving Role of Product Management

The shift from long-term deliveries to shorter, iterative cycles is not just a trend—it’s a necessity in today’s volatile markets. This evolution demands a new approach to product management, where the product owner plays a central role.

Product Ownership in Volatile Markets

Markets today are anything but static. They are volatile, with niches constantly growing and contracting. This volatility requires a dynamic approach to product management—one that can adapt to these fluctuations.

Cycle of Re-evaluation: The speed at which your market changes should dictate the cycle of re-evaluation for your product. The quicker your market evolves, the faster your organization needs to iterate.
Adapting to Market Needs: A product owner who is attuned to the market’s ebb and flow can help the organization pivot when necessary, ensuring that the product remains relevant and valuable.

Portfolio Management and Strategic Goals

Product management at the organizational level involves more than just managing a single product—it’s about managing a portfolio of products and ensuring that all efforts are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization.

Holistic Approach: Product management includes portfolio management, team coordination, and achieving strategic goals. Scrum, with its focus on short iterations and regular validation, is a tool that supports this broader approach.
Shared Vision and Goals: A key aspect of successful product management is creating a shared understanding of vision, goals, and value across the organization. This ensures that all self-organizing teams are working towards the same objectives.

Conclusion: Product Ownership and Product Management are Two Sides of the Same Coin

In conclusion, product ownership and product management are not separate roles—they are two sides of the same coin. In the context of Scrum, the product owner is simply a specific accountability within the broader domain of product management, focused on maximizing the value delivered by the Scrum team.

By understanding this relationship, organizations can avoid the pitfalls of misaligned roles and ensure that their product management practices are optimized for today’s fast-paced, ever-changing markets.

Embrace the Overlap: Don’t think of product ownership and product management as distinct entities. Instead, recognize their overlap and use it to your advantage.
Focus on Value: Whether you’re a product owner or a product manager, your ultimate goal should be the same: delivering value to your customers and your organization.
Adapt and Thrive: In a world where markets are constantly changing, the ability to adapt quickly is crucial. By embracing the principles of Scrum and Agile product management, you can ensure that your products remain relevant, valuable, and successful.

🔍 Remember: Effective product ownership is just effective product management—tailored for the Scrum framework. Stay focused on value, stay agile, and always be ready to pivot as your market evolves.

So effective product ownership focuses on product management. There’s a kind of misconception that we’re in some way replacing product management with product ownership or that they’re different things. Right? They’re absolutely not; they’re exactly the same thing.

This is where product ownership, within the context of Scrum, comes in. I definitely want to disambiguate between when I’m talking about the product owner. I’m talking about the product owner as defined within the context of Scrum and the Scrum guides, not the job title or role that your organisation has created and added other baggage that is nothing to do with those things.

You might have a product owner within your organisation, and it says in the job description, “also responsible for writing reports for management,” “also responsible for managing the product,” or “the project,” right? Or other stuff that is not what I’m talking about. The product owner is an accountability within the context of Scrum. That’s it. It defines that the product owner needs to be somebody that the organisation respects and that is accountable for the maximisation of value delivered from the work of the Scrum team.

That’s the product owner. The product owner’s job title is not “product owner.” That’s a made-up organisational misunderstanding of moving towards Scrum. There shouldn’t be job titles in your organisation that are “product owner” or “Scrum Master.” Those should not exist.

You’re in product management. If we take product management as a big wrapper of all of the things that need to be done in order to manage a product, we’re shifting the focus of that from a long-term, maybe we do a two-yearly delivery cycle, towards a very short delivery cycle. If we’re doing Scrum, there are some accountabilities that Scrum brings for those people that are doing product management.

One could say that the product owner is an aspect of existing product management that probably should always have been there in the first place but maybe wasn’t necessarily quantified enough to make it a viable thing. In the past, organisations have been able to skate by without having that clear vision, goal, and value focus.

Organisations were able to skate by; perhaps they had deep coffers built up from some product that didn’t have any competitors that they made, and now we have lots of money, so we actually, you know, we don’t need to maximise; we just need to get by. Or for other reasons, right? But as we move towards that shorter iterative cycle, it becomes more important to focus on value and less important to focus on more stuff.

We’re not maximising productivity; we’re not maximising the number of items we deliver per timeframe. We kind of are, but we’re not trying to deliver more stuff; we’re trying to deliver more valuable stuff. In order to deliver more valuable stuff rather than just more stuff, we need to understand what value is. To understand what value is, we need to understand what direction the organisation’s going, and that’s the foundation of product management.

Product ownership is an accountability in Scrum. I think I’ve said this before: Scrum is like a mirror. The mirror just reflects what you’re doing and says, “Why can’t you do this thing that we think you should need?” So the accountability of the product owner being maximising the value of the work done by the Scrum team—why can’t you do that? What’s inhibiting your ability to do that? That’s why the product owner accountability exists.

It’s not a job title; it’s not a job role; it’s an accountability that forces product management to reflect on why they can’t manage the product in this new context. Because we’re moving from those long-term deliveries towards shorter and shorter deliveries for all products across all industries. Part of the reason for that is we want to take advantage of opportunities in the market and deal with surprises that come from the market, right? Our environment or our business.

In order to take advantage of them, we need to do so more quickly than a competitor can come along and take advantage of them, or a new business can start up and take advantage of them. Otherwise, we’re too late to the party. So in order to do that, we need to move faster. What is the amount of time that your business needs to go around that cycle of re-evaluating what we’re doing? That’s the cycle you need to be on.

How quickly does your market change? Most of us don’t exist in static markets; we exist in volatile markets that are always changing. The niches that our organisation has grown to fit are growing and contracting on a regular basis. If they’re growing and contracting on a regular basis and you’re in one niche, you’re going to feel that pain on that cycle.

That’s something that sometimes my business suffers from, where you’ve got that cycle of organisations having their flesh with cash, so they’re looking to train people and increase skills, so our training business goes up. Then you have an economic downturn, and our training business drops. That’s the ebb and flow of any one business.

So how do you mitigate that? Well, as a product owner or product manager, you need to be thinking about how do we open out new markets? All of the ebbs and flows of those different markets operate on different cycles so that we maintain our ability to operate as a business without loss by divesting our interests into lots of different areas.

Product management at a big organisational level is thinking about how do we get into new markets? How do we get those new stories in? The product owner’s accountability is just to maximise the value of the work done by the team. So if we’re going to have a bunch of teams, we should maximise the value of the work that they’re actually doing.

In doing that, maximising the value return on investment that we get from the work that we do, we should be able to adapt to those changing needs in the market, do the product management thing. Product management includes portfolio; that’s part of it. Scrum is part of it because it’s managing the work done by the Scrum team.

That’s part of that story, creating little social technology that allows you to manage that, but it’s within that wider context. The idea is that we have a holistic approach to product management, of which the product owner is just an accountability, a part of that story. We need to create a shared understanding with vision, goals, and value for the direction that we’re going so that all of these self-organising teams can work together towards that common goal.

That’s how we achieve that common goal. We’re using shorter iterations, particularly Scrum in this context, if we’re talking about the product owner, for frequent product validation through inspection and adaptation. Scrum is founded on empiricism. We need to have regular tests to validate our hypothesis that a feature is going to advance value.

That is why saying that product ownership—how does product ownership build on the foundation of agile product management—is kind of like the reverse of the story. It’s actually how does product ownership enable product management to maximise the value that we’re trying to create.

Agile Product Management

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