[Closi]

The difference between product manager and product owner is subtle enough that it doesn’t make too much difference in my experience. What’s a product owner at one company is a product manager at another and visa-versa.

The one with marketing in the title is about marketing rather than product management.

[fooblat]

For me the difference is stark.

At my last three companies it worked like this:

Product Manager is responsible for the product strategy and feature roadmap. They spend most of their focus on internal and external customers. They report up through Product leadership.

Product Owner is part of the engineering squad. They spend most of their focus on the engineers building the product. The PO works on refinement, prioritizes the backlog, runs the sprint planning and retros, and is the one who can decide if a sprint should be broken. They also keep stakeholders up to date on the progress of the squad. They report up through Technical leadership.

In my experience it is a rare person who can do both of these at the same time.

[Closi]

I've been a Product Owner and been responsible for the product strategy, feature roadmap, backlog refinement and management of external stakeholders, reporting up through product leadership.

I've also been in a company that had "Product Managers" and "Product Owners", where "Product Manager" was just a more senior Product Owner, and the "Product Owners" reported into the "Product Managers".

All I mean is that - it's different things in different organisations, and what one company calls Product Owner another company will call Product Manager. If someone takes a job title saying "Product Owner" and expects that to mean they will definitely be reporting up through technical leadership, in the real world I think they will be surprised to find that's quite often not true :)

[fooblat]

This is my experience as well. You must always ask for a detailed description for these roles.

I've even seen companies that have a role called "Product Manager Owner" with a vague enough description that it could be either or both.

[haswell]

> In my experience it is a rare person who can do both of these at the same time.

I'm one of those rare people. I do not recommend it.

While I love my product and believe in the company I work for, I've seriously considered leaving so I can actually focus on one thing or the other.

For what it's worth, I'm a former full stack developer who transitioned into the product role. This means I have the technical skillset to translate for my dev teams. This is a blessing and a curse while wearing both hats.

[Maxion]

Threads on this topic pop up on HN every few months. To me seems pretty clear that in most companies the structure of the product team seems fundamentally broken. I feel very sad for people who do not see the value in having a PO or a PM on their team.

To use buzzywordy language, a PO is not supposed to micro manage the developers but to give them a framework and the freedom to move within it and to make sure the product is moving in a cohesive direction that makes it objectively "better", whether that is more sales or better customer satisfaction or whatever.

IMO The PM's role is to find that out and communicate the value of the product to the market and figure out how to do that.

I've worked at places where neither role existed and the developers led the show, this always resulted in actual customer needs getting ignored, massive misunderstandings on what issues were critical and which weren't, believing the customer was a high-income tech-savy 30 year old with a 15" MacBook Pro running Chrome.

If the companies customer is that, then great! But for most companies in the world that isn't the case.

[ako]

Product Marketing -> communicate to the market the value of the product built

Product Management -> determine from the market what product should be created, with what priorities, what releases

Pricing could be either Product Marketing, or Product Management, or both.

[DamilolaA]

Yeah. This is similar to my experience.

[midasuni]

In my company we use product owner and PO as it’s less likely to be confused with project manager and PM.