Product Owner versus Product Manager, Which One Should I Hire?

Q: What's the difference between a Product Manager & Product Owner? As a startup, which one should I hire?

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Companies use these job titles in confusing ways. In some cases they are used interchangeably, while, in others, they have demarcated roles.

Even top experts seem to be divided on this one. So, I'll stick to what they have meant in my career journey.

When I started out, there were only Product Managers.

The only exposure to the term "Product Owner" I had was in the context of managing SCRUM but that was never thought to be an entire job in of itself.

Working with development & running sprint work was part & parcel of what a "full-stack" PM would do. When you're part of a lean setup, there's no luxury of delegation.

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As a PM, I would broadly work on two activity types:

• External-facing: customer interviews, discovery, roadmaps & strategy, etc.
• Team-facing: specs, wireframing, backlog management, running sprints, retros, etc.

Naturally, when the role is so functionally dense, it will run thin on throughput.

Thus, over the years, the Product Owner role was formalized to take over the team-facing chunk.

A PO ensures that the product gets built right with minute details in mind. Their gamut of activities involve spec work, acceptance criteria, backlog management & running point on SCRUM giving the PM space to focus on strategy.

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Thus, by this definition:

1. A Product Owner role is a SCRUM specialist and owns a subset of what a Product Manager was once responsible for. Ex: As a PM at Yallamotor, leading SCRUM was only part of the job
2. A PM can technically exist even without an engineering team. A PO only makes sense when tech is already hired. Ex: We had a PM for AfterHire before a single line of code was written & the product MVP was being conceived

No, this doesn't imply a PO is a "lesser" role than a "PM". It's just more specialized.

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However, you can't expect a long-term strategic vision to be led by a PO.

So, who do you hire?

It depends on your product stage.

If you:

• Are a lean startup that's still formulating a concept, hire a PM
• Are a founder with a validated MVP scope that needs to be materialized asap, hire a PO
• Have a stable product with funds & plans to rapidly scale breadth, hire both.

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But mind you, this PM-PO dichotomy can be dangerous.

Since PMs own the customer relations & strategic arcs, a PO can get tunnel-visioned into becoming a user-story machine. Their spec work can start veering away from their point-of-view.

On the other hand, an external-focused PM loses sense on team health, velocity & technical debt.

The only solution then is overlapping execution & critical alignment.

A PO must perform some customer discovery work to absorb the user perspective. They need to think like a PM in that way,

And a PM should still contribute in backlog grooming sessions & a few retros to keep in touch with tech's progress.