Or “What is the difference between a Product Manager and a Product Owner?”

When people are working a large scale implementation of agile and they see definitions of the role of Product Owner and the role of a Product Manager (and the various other potential layers of working “content” priorities), they cannot help but feel confused. After all, they also seem to say “there is a backlog that needs to be prioritized” and that they “should work with customers”. How do we position the various roles?

Before we get started, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. This is a discussion on how people should collaborate as they work the problem of deciding what value we can / should deliver next. This is not a reporting structure.

But what you do find is that (for large implementation) you might need various levels of structure as there is too much to do for one person. For example if you are working as a Product Owner with a team, then to do this well will require full time work. In this case if the what you are delivering (eg Product, Solution, whatever) can be worked by a single team, then the Product Owner can work directly with customers, work the roadmap, etc.

But if the value you are delivering takes more than a couple of Teams, say 35 teams to deliver a soluton (OK, “35” was the number of teams I had when I first did an agile transformation) then a single Product Owner Take a look at:

This is one way of positioning the differences in role (note: I am not talking about the different ceremonies different levels attend).