Do organizations really need a Product Owner ?
From my personal experience, having a Product Owner apart from Product Manager would often create problems than benefits. The product owner layer is the contribution of Scrum and is being adopted by many organizations believing to be useful considering the benefits of many other concepts of Scrum.
When we get into the specifics of the role, a product owner is the one who takes business requirements and implements the same through dev team. He is the one who is tasked with the role of grooming and prioritizing the product backlogs. The role is more tactical and project oriented which lacks strategic thinking.
The role of a Product Manager is tied to taking more strategic decisions on the product like deciding on which market to enter, what feature to built and budgeting, to name a few. The Product Manager needs to deal with various stakeholders to remove blockers in achieving product goals. He is the one who sets the product targets in consultation with the higher managers — Senior Product Manager or VP of Products.
Some times, the activities of both Product Manager and Product Owner overlap’s, thus leads to conflicts. Considering the fact that, Product Owner role is limited to tactical decision making, his career prospect is limited in contrast to the Product Manager. A product Manager has the liberty of taking strategic decisions and naturally get’s visibility to climb the higher ladders in the organization.
As rightly said by Mellissa Perri in her book titled “Buid Trap”, when you try to advance on the career ladder, the product owner will not have the experience with strategy that is needed to be effective. Its imperative that orgnizations must scrap the product owner role and ensure that their product managers are effectively executing their role with the right mix of strategic and tactical tasks.
