Product Manager, Scrum Product Owner, and Value
- "The Scrum Product Owner and the Product Manager roles are the same because they both try to maximize product value."
Let's deconstruct the different misconceptions in this statement.
- The Scrum Product Owner is a role.
- The Product Manager is a job, comprised of one or more designated roles.
- The Product Planner is a key strategic role in product management.
- The Product Planner's objective is being a market expert, to gain a true understanding of the market and its needs.
- The Product Planner does not maximize or optimize value. Relative or resultant value is the outcome of efficiently solving market problems.
There is also confusion between skills and responsibilities. A Scrum Product Owner can have product management skills, but that does not make them a product manager or responsible for product management.
The Scrum Guide does not define value. But value, particularly the resultant value, is the outcome of prioritization, which means that the Scrum Product Owner will prioritize Product Backlog Items (PBIs) based on strategic guidance from the Product Planner.
So the Scrum Product Owner manages the product backlog and steers the development effort to maximize product value, subject to guidelines from the market expert, the PMTK Product Planner.
* Part of the CLARITY IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT SERIES.