Differences Among Product Managers, Product Owners and Business Analysts

Q: What's the difference between a Business Analyst (BA), Product Owner (PO) and Product Manager (PM)?

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I'll start with a classical cop-out: It depends.

In practice, most companies blur the lines between the roles and you'll find them executing overlapping duties.

Back in the day, the responsibility of all three was managed by a full-stack Product Manager. However, as a product evolves in scale, there might come a need to hire specialists to dedicate themselves to key areas in the product development cycle.

So, when an organization does end up hiring all three, how does that division of labor look like?

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I'll try to analogize this with the construction of a house:

A Product Manager decides what kind of house to build & where

They own the global product strategy, the long-term roadmap & customer discovery processes. They setup the reporting metrics, greenlight major initiatives, prioritize epics, manage expectations with leadership and spearhead cross-functional collaboration especially GTM.

A Product Owner owns the blueprint of the house

They decide what goes into each shippable increment. They are responsible for local prioritization, backlog grooming & conduct bug triages. They also tend to have a lot of the specific details on the domain & guide BAs on subject matter. Usually, they adopt their namesake role in Scrum as well.

A Business Analyst is like the interior designer

They give definition to each backlog item & turn them into actionable artefacts that engineering can develop against. In client-driven environments, they are also used for direct requirements elicitation. They flesh out specs & user stories, work with designers to fine-tune prototypes, document workflow logic, product copy & workflows.

I've seen BAs adopt the product owner role sometimes in Scrum as well.

Example?

Let's say you're building a SaaS platform to help doctors generate more patient leads.

• A Product Manager would decide that we need an appointment booking system for web & mobile
• A Product Owner decides we need to build a responsive marketing page for each doctor that leads into a 3-step booking flow. He/she elects user stories like rescheduling & email reminders and points out the calendar integrations needed based on what doctors use the most in the active market
• A Business Analyst writes detailed user stories for the happy flow, for changing the timezone, for flagging multiple bookings/conflicts & the rescheduling experience

Scenario to have all three positions

1. When you have multiple products running & large product eco systems
2. When the product is complex with a lot of moving pieces (e.g. ERP) where each user story needs deep considerations of inter-dependencies. A BA can handle the grunt work while Product Owners lay out the sprints
3. When Product Managers & Owners are embroiled in discovery, prioritization and domain analysis tasks and need BAs to assist with delivery