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Agile Product Manager vs. Agile Product Owner Attributes

January 29, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management

Agile Product Manager vs. Agile Product Owner Attributes
By Jennifer Fawcett

The following chart comparing the Agile Product Manager attributes to those of the Agile Product Owner and highlighting the differences between the two is a super-set of data that I’ve compiled from various sources:

Agile Product Manager (APM) attributes Agile Product Owner (APO) attributes
Tracks industry trends Tracks internal cadence and deliveries
Defines release objectives Defines iteration objectives
Provides overall strategic direction Provides day-to-day tactical direction
Delivers business level use cases or stories Provides system level use case or story elaboration
Has a solid understanding of current solutions Has an understanding of architectural component and subsystem design
Defines external roadmaps Defines user acceptance tests
Manages release and portfolio priorities and backlogs Manages the iteration and cross project priorities
Manages the changing needs of the market and customer base Unblocks and focuses the portfolio or feature teams throughout the iteration
Manages market messaging and positioning Manages defect scheduling
Provides the overall vision Provides the implementation
Lives in Marketing Lives in Engineering
Communicates daily with the Product Owner (shares a brain with the PO) Communicates daily with the Product Manager (shares a brain with the PM)
Delivers The Release Delivers The Iteration

Jennifer Fawcett has been providing product management, marketing, and software expertise for to technology companies for over 20 years. Jennifer is also the author of AgileProductOwner.com.

Jennifer spent several years in Product Management at Rational Software (now IBM-Rational), primarily in their intellectual property unit, developing the product marketing to help to bring their thought leadership and software process education courses to market. Jennifer has also spent a large portion of her career as a professional consultant, providing senior level agile product management, product marketing, corporate messaging architecture, and web development expertise to a variety of emerging markets.

Jennifer lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she works as an Engineering Release Manager for a Clean Tech startup. Jennifer can be reached at Jennifer (at) agileproductowner.com.

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