Product owner vs product manager. What's the difference?

A product manager can be a product owner, but a product owner may not be able to work as a product manager.

A product manager has tactical and large-scale responsibilities while a product owner works closer to the product features and agile team.

In Scrum:

  • We have only one Product Owner who has the ultimate product responsibility.
  • A product owner is not all-knowing, so it requires other Scrum roles' contributions to the product backlog items.
  • A product owner is the ultimate decision maker and determines the most valuable backlog items with the help of the other Scrum roles.

A product owner who has business insight may be required in many organizations, which means a product manager.This means more work for the product manager, who often has to handle external and internal requests. A successful product manager MUST directly support the team that requires leadership by empowering and working with them in both the business and Scrum development team to do the work.

Image by dcstudio

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