But is he a PO or is he a PM?

I don’t give a damn about your bullshit.

A bit of a violent start I’ll admit, but let me get to my point.

Marty the observer, not the analyst

Below is an image of Marty Cagan at the School Of Product 2022. On his slide is written “a product owner is simply a role in a delivery process. A product manager is responsible for a product’s value and viability”.

This image says what the PO has become, not what it was and why it was imagined. It was imagined and invented exactly for what the PM is cited there for. To be responsible for product value. But then why this gap? Because Marty – as a good Silicon Valley ambassador – describes the market, not the principles on which we should be basing ourselves.

I therefore encourage you not to rush headlong into this statement.

Marty Cagan’s conference was very good by the way.

I don’t want to attack Cagan, I want to highlight that he describes what he observes and that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea all the time. It’s his way of operating, that’s how he describes it. He’s not someone who has ideas, he’s someone who is in the right place at the right time and who knows how to communicate or popularize well.

So why this gap between what he observes and what we’d like it to be?

Benjamin Fourio on Linkedin answers me: Cagan’s quote only reinforced the idea I had of a schism between tech companies whose software is the core business and non-tech companies that have to produce software to support their operations. The former being closer to a Cagan and therefore to product management and the latter perhaps closer to movements around agility (in the sense of software engineering).

For a long time I observed a mixture of the two and today I’m convinced that they must be clearly distinguished and not try to link the fate of the two movements.

That’s plausible.

Rather than gap I’d like to talk about drift. Drift?

On one hand caused by politics within companies. On the other hand by scaling.

Politics within companies

On one hand there’s a political game: the product managers are the internals who oversee the externals, the product owners. The title serves to establish a hierarchy. A bad hierarchy: no responsibility, just bossing. Then according to everyone’s desires and skills, the activity is distributed intelligently or not.

Difficult for a company to admit that the responsibility for the product (therefore the core of the company) is entrusted to an external. The PM/PO duo often masks this fact.

Quick flashback, demand in France exploded around 2015/2017, I know it, I was there, and I played a role in it with benext, and the creation precisely of the school of product¹. At the beginning of the product owner movement, I thought it very odd that a company would give responsibility for its product to an external (I was working for a consulting company that delivered you product owners that we hoped were top-notch, and who grew with us), I was quickly contradicted by the market which rushed towards product owners (and fortunately in a way that brought us quite a bit of success). But it remains odd to my eyes that product management is outsourced. The support, the consulting ok, the activity itself I remain dubious. But the market proves me wrong. Many do it.

Why? Because probably too few people – unfortunately – truly want to take on this responsibility, and naturally all the failures that will necessarily occur (with successes too). The company has become in the current geopolitical storm (pandemic, planetary boundaries, wars, etc.) a very fearful organism.

The product owner gets their hands dirty. They have an opinion on the product and they go all the way: they accompany the developments, and the putting into the user’s hands, and they validate or invalidate: during development, and after, the adoption. Validating, getting your hands dirty (not just thinking, but doing), assuming the choices, well not everyone wants to do it. Very often it’s more comfortable to declare oneself a Product Manager and only do the things that attach to pure thought without bearing any responsibility.

So that’s a first deviance: political, internal, external, accountability, bullshit jobs, etc.

What should it be?

No matter if you’re a PO or PM: you must be responsible for the product. If we make decisions on things for which we’re not responsible our decisions aren’t the right ones, because we’re not involved.

No matter if you’re a PO or PM: you must be interested in the entire product lifecycle: from why, to how, from the initial idea, to its reception by its market. We do things much better when we understand the ins and outs.

And thus removing the notion of responsibility and viability from the PO by Marty Cagan, it’s just an idiocy. Not from Marty Cagan, from the market. Who decides to remove intelligence, to forbid it, to deprive themselves of it. Sure a hierarchy can exist because if everyone has an opinion, and everyone decides, it’s often the end of the beans. But that everyone is responsible for their part, and engaged because they master their domain of activity is only beneficial.

Scaling

Scaling has brought another need, and this is where I think lies the whole issue with Marty Cagan’s formulation. Scaling has brought a need for synchronization, for fluidity in manufacturing and delivery. Scaling has brought a role that English speakers have called the delivery manager. That’s good… another manager we were running out! The need is legitimate: synchronizing the assembly of several teams is necessary and tools often aren’t enough.

But then it absolutely shouldn’t be called Product Owner but Delivery Manager. Because this person isn’t linked to the product, but to delivery. Easy if you have delivery in your title you’re responsible for delivery: its fluidity, its quality, etc. But you are in no way responsible for trade-offs on content. And if you have “product” in your title you’re responsible for the product, with different hierarchical degrees and therefore perspective (hence PM and PO).

Conclusion

Marty Cagan’s sentence is a symbol of market drifts, he should have put delivery manager on one side, and product owner/manager on the other.

The strength of an agile approach like Scrum (and others) is to delimit and balance responsibilities between the what and why on one side, and the how on the other. The product owner and the product manager are on the same side and it’s more a perspective of viewpoint and hierarchy that applies to them. But for quality activity they are both engaged and therefore responsible for their part of the product, the what and why. The delivery manager is on the how side, they make the process fluid.

If I reread Benjamin’s proposal above, the difference between tech and non-tech companies is that perhaps in one case the what and why integrate technological aspects, whereas in the other technology is limited to the how.

Finally, yes the product owner is unfortunately too often understood as a process facilitation role, like project management. Change your title, call yourself project manager or delivery manager because without that we’re hurting what agility is, and we’re not highlighting the harm we do to our products by calling ourselves responsible for the product without being so. Name things properly!