

The Product Manager vs. Product Owner - bdehaaff
http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-product-manager-vs-product-owner/

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LauriStahle
For me coming from applied Systems Engineering, I see this as a very good
lessons learned sharing - Thanks ! The article just forced me to write down
few comments, my emphasis, and thoughts, coming from my background and
experience as a Systems Architect.

I'd like to reflect back with my words, that one needs to get customer
dialogue and engineering dialogue into balance, to be able to create
successful products and/or services and to be able to launch them in time.

One has to ensure that the customer needs are refined well for engineering,
for product and/or services content decisions and for development. This along
with a company own strategical and internal needs and requirements. The
engineering process may be agile, lean, waterfall, V etc, but the information,
how and by who it is harvested, and what are the dependencies, are very
important matters.

There are several means to ensure the effective refinement of information. The
given lessons and described work sharing looks good and is surely important.
E.g. epics were mentioned, and required good PM&PO co-operation.

Should the customer categories, portfolio and/or required engineering effort
increase, the situation gets more complicated. One needs to ensure that the
information is captured on/by identified locations/roles, and that it's
refined on for relevant stakeholders e.g. in engineering. In many
organizations today, it is impossible to rely on an IT solution stored
information as your input data. In many cases personal network is emphasized
instead, which makes the operations too much person and person2person relation
dependent, as well fragile. For sure the network of colleges is important !

We should complement the proposed PM&PO work sharing and good relations are
far as possible, BUT with defined information model, tasked refinement roles,
and minimum amount of control mechanisms, whatever process is been applied in
the organization.

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vijayramaiah
This is actually the same challenge we have had in traditional software
development environments. We addressed it by have a Product Manager (Business
owner) and Technical Product Manager (analogous to Product Owner).

