Product Owner vs Product Manager — What’s The Difference?
Published in
6 min readJun 3, 2020
The difference between the Product Manager and Product Owner gets very blurry in most companies.
Does the Product Owner-report into the product manager?
Or does the Product Manager report into a Product Owner?
With so much debate in the industry, I’m going to answer this age-old question so you can be clear about where you sit in the company.
In this post, we’ll go through:
- Where does the Product Manager & the Product Owner sit in a product function
- How does the Product Manager fit in a Scrum team
- How to look at a job description to identify a Product Manager role vs a Product Owner role
- What is the best practice industry definition of the two roles
Let’s get right to it!
Firstly, Let’s Understand The Product Function
Before we go into the role, we need to understand the product function within a company. The product function manages the following 3 areas:
