The product owner, product leader product manager and the scrum accountabilities

Disclaimer

I welcome product managers and product leaders to the session in my product owner classes. However, there are differences between product owners, product leaders, and product managers. When people come to my class, I’m not teaching them about product management or product leadership. I might introduce them to some concepts in the same space, but I would not want people to believe that I have taught them about product management or product leadership.

Marty Cagan, with his Silicon Valley product group, has a great set of workshops to help people understand more about product management and product leadership.

Preliminaries

What does a product leader do? (At least my understanding of what a product leader does)

When thinking about a product leader, I want you to imagine a situation where:

1. we have a product, a vehicle for delivering value; and
2. that is recognized by the customer or end-user i.e., that you understand what it is, and when you mention it, they know what you’re talking about; and
3. they pay for it, either with their money, their time, or their data.

Somebody is producing it, and somebody is consuming it.

So if you have:

• a real product; and
• that product is externally facing, just like I mentioned; and
• if you have multiple teams working on that product…

…you are going to have a situation where you might have multiple product managers.

If you had product managers working in teams, the product manager might act as a developer and a team.

A tech lead from a product management point of view would operate as a developer from a Scrum point of view. The design lead would act as a developer.

From a Scrum point of view, there’s a bit of tension between Scrum and product management because, in Scrum…