I’ve noticed a decent amount of discussion lately on LinkedIn and other areas regarding the difference between Product Owners and Product Managers when it comes to Agile development practices. The confusion largely stems from the fact that textbook Scrum has a very specific definition of the Product Owner role, but has nothing at all to say about the Product Management role, which is entirely understandable, since Scrum concerns itself with the execution of product development by engineers and not with the ideation of product by the business side of the equation. This simply means that we can’t just take textbook Scrum and expect that it provides us with a comprehensive set of guidelines for how to run our business, because it was never conceived of as such.
Let’s break this down a little bit…