Is Product manager = product owner?
The agile community approaches often product management differently. Or at least takes another attempt to define an important role. Every agile method advocates for a market representative on every team. In Scrum this role is called the product owner. Because the developers of agile methods didn’t want to impose the industry baggage of product management on their “market representative” role, they called it product owner instead.
Wikipedia offers this definition:
The Product Owner represents the voice of the customer. He/she ensures that the Scrum Team works with the “right things” from a business perspective. The Product Owner writes customer-centric items (typically user stories), prioritizes them and then places them in the product backlog. A Product Owner can be a member of the Scrum Team but cannot be a ScrumMaster.
This seems fairly clear but alas, often fails in implementation. Many agilists argue that the product owner can also be the project manager and the product designer, even though all of the seminal works say explicitly otherwise.
One agile advocate claimed that the product owner was responsible for everything that developers didn’t want to do. Project management, design, QA, everything.
Let’s stick with the published works. The Product Owner (or product manager) represents the voice of the customer.
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