Session Description
Are you a business analyst who wonders how you can use your business analysis capabilities to be competitive in the job market for the next 3 to 5 years?
As I first noted back in 2017, product owner and product manager roles offer a viable career path for business analysts, especially those who currently work on custom software development projects.
Come to this session to learn about the similarities and differences between business analysis, product owner, and product manager roles. Then discover how you can apply your business analysis experience to becoming a product owner or product manager. Along the way, you’ll hear about the lessons I and others have learned from moving from business analysis through product owner to product management roles.
Learning Objectives
- Compare business analysis, product owner, and product management roles
- Learn how to use your business analysis skills to successfully become a product owner or product manager
- Discover lessons learned from people who have moved from business analysis to product manager
Handout
15 Minute chat with Adrian Reed
In this session recorded in 2023 (prior to the Building Business Capability conference) I talked with Adrian Reed, Principal Consultant at Blackmetric Business Solutions, about my career journey and the evolving roles of business analysts, product owners, and product managers.
I emphasized the overlap between business analysis and product management, highlighting that business analysts possess many transferable skills.
While product owners focus on short-term delivery, product managers take a broader, longer-term view, considering market needs and business viability.
Thanks Adrian for posting this on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it.
Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.
So what inspired the title From BA to product owner to product manager?
I have had a winding road of a career path but basically that title pretty much described how it went. And, part of that was because I was a BA before the concept of product owner existed, and certainly before people thought to have product managers inside their organization working on stuff that their employees use.
What is a product owner? What is a product manager? How, how are they different? How are they the same? How would you describe those things?
I’m gonna start with what a product manager is because product owner is a subset of that.
So a product manager originally came about in consumer product goods where they were trying to figure out how to really kind of drive their individual products forward. And as software products became a thing, the role of product manager came about from that.
Product managers try to solve problems for their clients, or their customers, in a way that’s good for the business. So they have to balance what’s good for their customer, what helps them solve problems, but at the same time makes sense for the business to do.
So most product managers that you hear about are usually working on stuff that their company sells to other people.
But lately as organizations have started going through these transformations that they’re trying to make their internal products more useful and more effective they’ve realized that, well, we did this agile software development thing, and that works pretty good for building software, but we aren’t always building the right things. So what else can we figure out?
And they start using a lot of those product management techniques of doing discovery and figuring out what problems are we trying to solve and what outcomes are we trying to help people get to, to start kind of describing and figuring out what should we build for our employees to use.
That’s what product management is at a very high level.
Product ownership is the part of product management that mostly deals with the team building the solution.
It originally came about as a result of teams using the Scrum framework. The folks who created Scrum created the proper role, and they came up with that title because they wanted to differentiate it from other roles such as project manager.
But what it comes down to is that’s the individual who works closely with the product team to develop a solution.
There’s a lot of product management that doesn’t show up in the typical two day product owner course. Most of those courses don’t cover a lot of the discovery – figuring out “are we rebuilding the right thing?”
The Scrum guide mentions, “oh yeah, the product owner should do those things,” but doesn’t provide any real guidance as to how it’s done.
When you see product owners in practice, they are usually joined at the hip with the development team, which means they don’t always have the time available to go out and really understand what the market is telling them.
That’s really interesting, Kent. So if I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying that the product manager will need to have that holistic external view of what the market needs.
Also, they’ll need long horizon thinking with a strategic view that needs to connect with what the product owner does; but the product owner is going to be essentially working with the delivery engine of whatever software change or whatever needs to happen in order to enable that bigger strategic thing.
So is it fair to say that the product owner will be connected with that longer strategic pathway, but they’re likely to have a shorter delivery horizon? Do you think that’s fair?
That’s assuming that if you have both, if different people filling those two roles?
Yes.
One of the biggest arguments that’s been going on in the product space is what’s the product owner? What’s the product manager? Are they the same, are they different? Should you have both?
And depending on which community, the person that answers those questions hangs out in, they’ll give different answers.
So most folks in the product management space would say, “ideally you don’t have split responsibilities. Ideally, you have a product person that is simultaneously keeping an eye on kind of the outside the market, that longer horizon viewpoint, trying to figure out what problems are we trying to solve and working with the team coming up with solutions and delivering those solutions.” The reason you want to have the same person doing that is to avoid that game of telephone where wires get crossed and the messages get mixed up.
If you talk to someone from the agile community, they’re gonna say, “oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, product owners do all that. They do really, we don’t train you about that in the CSPO class, but trust me, they do it.”
In reality, oftentimes what you’ll see is there are different models where some organizations have product managers that do all of those things.
There’s others where there’s product managers that are explicitly focusing on the outside view and product owners that are more focused on working directly with teams.
And so, as you were talking about in that situation, if an organization is using that model, yes, you would want those two folks to be joined at the hip so that you have as little miscommunication as possible.
And ideally, the product owner is also getting exposure to customers as well. And frankly, if you really are doing things the way you’d really hope to be doing it, you’re actually incorporating the team. And so developers, designers are all getting exposure to what your customers are looking for, that you’re trying to build for.
Yeah, absolutely. Which I think echoes a comment that Kenny’s made about that smooth transition between the different elements of the roles.
And I guess that’s, that’s the whole thing. It’s the role, not the title kind of element.
Which brings me on to the next question because a lot of people I’m sure tuned into this will be business analysts. And I know in your, in your abstract for your session at BBC, you mentioned that this could be an area of interest for BAs.
So, I’m listening to this as a BA thinking. Yeah. There’s a lot of similarity there with what a good BA would do in terms of holistic thinking, some of the strategic thinking as well.
So what would you say BAs should be thinking about? How should they connect with this world?
And, and that’s kind of how I got there. In fact back in 2007, I kind of took the angle that says, and this was ’cause this idea was way new then, was there is a p role, a PM job title that is a great fit for the business analysis career ladder. It’s not project management, which at that time, everybody used to think.
In fact, I went through the thing where I got into business analyst because the consulting company I was working for said, we know you’ve done project management and automotive, but you haven’t done it in it. So to train you on it, we’re gonna have you do this business analysis thing first. And then we’ll move you into project management.
And as it turned out, I enjoyed the business analysis stuff a heck of a lot more.
But there’s a huge overlap between what business analysts do and how they think and how they look at things and what product managers do. The big difference is that product managers are expected to make decisions. Business analysts often are at the most making sure decisions get made, pulling information together and providing them to decision makers.
This is not the fault of the business analysts themselves, it’s the nature of the type of work they’re asked to do. Most often business analysts are on teams that are handed a solution to deliver and are often paired with a project manager to do those types of things.
On the other hand, one key responsibility for product managers is understanding what problem they’re trying to solve, and then working with the team to figure out what solution they should deliver.
So a big switch for business analysts, fortunately they have all the tools necessary to do this, is trying to really understand the problem they’re trying to solve.
So all of those times, Adrian, in your classes and when you’ve been consulting with business analysts and tell ’em, “you need to think about the problem you’re trying to solve”, you’re really saying, “act like a product manager.” I think that’s the biggest difference.
Yeah. That’s really interesting. And I think that that will be music to the ears of many BAs listening to this. That element of getting that problem analysis, strategy analysis, enterprise analysis. It’s been called many things by different organizations over the time. But that understanding the mess, understanding the different perspectives and the mess that’s going on there.
So one of the books you wrote was How to Be An Agile Business Analyst. How would you say agile and or agility in the macro level fits in with this shift towards product management and ownership?
I’ve come to the point now where I just inherently operate in an agile fashion. So it actually strikes me when people explicitly step it outside things, “how does agile fit into this?”
I would say that modern product management relies heavily on agile, and it just assumes that agile is the approach used to develop the software. Because part of understanding what problem you’re trying to solve is also realizing that you’re not going to completely understand that problem when you start out. You’re going to learn throughout the entire process as you’re actually building your solution.
So you’re going to be much better off if you can create a small portion of your solution, get it out to your customers, see how they’re using it, get feedback, and make adjustments based on what you find out, what you learn and tweak things.
You’re learning more about the problem, you’re learning more about the solution, and you’re constantly iterating.
And it also helps the whole experimentation approach, which is also kind of a key aspect of modern product management.
So agile’s inherently important, but it’s not sufficient to effectively deliver products. You need that discovery that goes along with it.
Yeah. Again, that’s really interesting, Kent, and, and a whole, whole nother wider topic. But that agile delivery engine, and then the organizational agility to see outside and see what’s coming.
As we’re talking, I can absolutely see how the product management will fit at that macro level and, and the agile methods in terms of Scrum or Kanban or whatever working at the sort of delivery element as well.
And that feedback ripple like a two way, there’s communication in terms of the feedback from stuff that’s coming up and in both ways.
And Kenny’s added another really great comment here that the the product manager identifies and the BA solves, which is an interesting observation.
Again, I guess Kent, it depends if the BA or the PM or the same person or a different person or whatever, but an interesting angle as well.
So without spoiling too much about your session at the conference, if there was one takeaway that people are gonna get from it, what’s that takeaway gonna be?
I think the takeaway that I would hope people get out of it is that it’s definitely possible for business analysts to move into product management type opportunities. Whether that is working on what you would think of as internal products, so things that are used inside of an organization, or products that your company sells. And I think that looking for those types of opportunities is a great way to move your career forward in a very rich, fulfilling, and lucrative fashion.
Further Info About Moving into Product Management
As a result of putting this session together, my “spidey sense” became attuned to other advice for moving into product management.
Here’s a collection of helpful hints I’ve come across in the past few weeks.
On LinkedIn, Victoria Rubanovich provided some suggestions for getting product experience within your own organization.
Victoria also suggested building your own product, which she did to help get her job at Amazon.
Also from LinkedIn, I got this one very important tip from Austin Yang: A shockingly simple thing you can do to stand out against 80% of the candidates when interviewing for a PM role: Try. The. Product.
Related Posts
This session was a fun one to put together and present because it’s a topic I’ve been dabbling with for quite a while. Ok. It’s actually something I’ve lived most of my career.
Here are some related posts on the topic of product people roles.
This post is a somewhat in depth look at different product roles, and the different models for including product people on teams, both internal facing and external facing.
This article, originally published in the Q4 2022 Edition of BA Digest from Blackmetric Business Solutions is the inspiration for the presentation I gave at BBC.