Ready to level up your impact? Business Analysts are uniquely positioned to become great Product Owners—but the leap isn’t always obvious. This session explores the perspective and skills necessary to successfully move from business analysis to product ownership. We’ll break down what’s transferable, what’s new, and how to navigate the journey with confidence.
Product Ownership on InsideProduct
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The roles product people play
If you’re like many product people you’ve wondered why some things aren’t getting done, worried that you’re overstepping your bounds, or got irked that someone else is overstepping their bounds.
A lot of this confusion comes from the complicated nature of product people roles and titles. It doesn’t help matters that different organizations interpret those roles and titles differently.
In the hope of providing a bit of clarity, this post explores product roles and titles. We’ll start out by defining roles and titles, then we’ll explore roles and titles in an external product setting and roles and titles in an internal product setting.
Moving from Business Analyst to Product Owner to Product Manager
Learn how to go from a business analyst job to a role as a product owner or product manager based on the experience of those who’ve done it.
Analysis Techniques for Product Owners
Analysis Techniques for Product Owners is a video training course explains how product owners can use business analysis techniques to be more effective.
What product owners need to know about business analysis
I suspect you didn’t start your career with the goal to be a product owner. You may have started as a developer, a subject matter expert from a business unit, or a business analyst. Regardless of your background, once you start product ownership, you need to practice three habits to be an effective product owner
Additional Reading
Product Owner is a Role. Product Manager is a Job.
Melissa Perri’s article inspired me to put together this compilation. The key thoughts from her post:
- Product owner is a role you play.Product manager is a a job.
- Scrum talks about the tactical activities that product owners do. Product Management provides the foundational skills to know when you are delivering the right thing.
Don’t Split the Role.
Marty Cagan contributed a couple of articles to the debate. In his first post, Marty argued that it is difficult to make informed product decisions unless you can appreciate the customer’s pain and the technical difficulties involved in addressing that pain. When you split the role, you lose the connection between those two items.
In his second post, Marty realized that in his attempt to avoid splitting product management, he communicated that it was ok to consider product owners and product managers as the same thing. He realized the error in his ways as he ran into multiple product owners who didn’t have a full appreciation of the broader product management responsibilities.
Roles and Titles Don’t Matter.
Roman Pichler’s perspective is that product owner is a product management role, and ultimately the debate doesn’t add much value. We should just refer to everyone as product people and focus more on the activities. That’s certainly an idea I can get behind.
Product Owner is a Role Played by a Product Manager
Dave West also calls product owner a role that a product manager plays, but his perspective seems to be that the most important that product manager playing the role of product owner should do is directly support the delivery team.
There is a Difference between PO and PM
Cliff Gilley also points out that the product owner role is defined entirely based on it’s relationship with the team and as a result is a subset of the product management responsibilities. He also argues that it is possible for there to be both a product manager and product owner in certain circumstances.
A Dynamic Duo
Nick Coster argues that there is a difference between product managers and product owners and they most definitely should be different people. His argument is that using agile (ok, specifically Scrum) adds new responsibilities for product people which should be filled by a product owner in addition to a product manager, so that each person can focus.
Product Owner? We Don’t Need No Product Owner!
Wade Shearer addressed the product owner vs product manager debate by saying we don’t need the product owner role. His view is that the product owner role is a product delivery role and does not play any part in determine whether you’re building the right thing.
Product owner or product manager
Nils Davis suggested this post in the comments and I thought it was a great addition to the various perspectives. He applies the idea of context to examine the product owner/product management looking at what’s appropriate for IT applications (what I typically refer to as Internal Products) and Commercial Software products. A great addition to the discussion!
The Collision of Product Management and Product Ownership
Anthony Murphy shared his perspective in the product management/product ownership conversation. He joins the conversation by taking a look bak at the history of product management, the history of agile, and how the two collided into the confusion that product people face today.
Product Owners and Product Managers: What’s the Difference?
Teresa Torres wants to talk about product managers and product owners.
This is a topic that’s come up quite a bit for her in the last few weeks.She’s had several companies ask her if they should be hiring product managers or product owners. Do they need both?
And so she wanted to talk a little bit about these two roles, the differences, and what they mean in terms of where you are on your own journey toward a continuous discovery process.