What do Product Managers, Product Owners and Business Analysts have in common?
Nowadays companies have job openings with so many, different and often conflicting job titles. By working as a Business Analyst, Product Owner and Product Manger, I realised what the three jobs have in common. Before I will explain what they have in common, let me tell the story of how I ended up in these different roles.
I landed my first job as a Business Analyst in the banking sector. I was fresh out of university and had studied Computer Engineering and Information Systems management. The team was developing a trading platform and these were my daily tasks:
- Communication with different stakeholders
- Requirements gathering
- Studying regulations and the implications for requirements
- Collaborate with the development team to come up with solutions to problems
- Coordinate and participate in testing campaigns
- Participating in trainings and creating documentation
In an attempt to change my life, I decided to move in another country. I started looking for a new job through my network. I chose the Netherlands and I started looking for BA jobs cause that’s what I knew how-to-do. I wanted to work as a BA, maybe in a different field.
The Netherlands is a country with many start-ups which generally do not have BA positions. I started talking to friends and one night I called one of them. I explained him my situation, what I know to do, that companies for some reasons do not have the BA position etc. He was working on a young company so he told this: “So what’s the problem? What you just described to me, we called it the Product Owner role. Apply to us!”.
Hmmm Product Owner, I heard that somewhere during my master studies… Of course, it’s Scrum role! After a month, I got the job and a great journey started there for me as a Product Owner. One and a half year after, my daily tasks were something like this:
- Create and maintain the Product Backlog
- Prioritise Product Backlog Items
- Develop and communicate the product vision
- Attend all scrum events
- Make sure the team delivers business value
Finally, I knew what I had to do when I go to work… or not? A new project was assigned to my team. It was a huge custom development for one client. The project was signed and a 10 page requirements document landed on my desk. After reading the first page of the document, I started to feel lost. The words did not make sense, requirements were fuzzy and most important I did not know the problem I was trying to solve.
How I could make valuable user stories? How I could prioritise? How will I validate the outcomes? So many questions without an answer… I started looking for answers involving firstly the people that wrote the document, the people that sold the project, the people that approached the client.. I talked to everyone. But I was still not sure what I have to do. I found out that the emails I was sending to colleagues were just forward to the client and the client’s emails forwarded to me. Sounds familiar?
Next step was to ask for a contact to establish a direct communication with the client. Finally, I could ask my questions and get answers, I could understand the clients pain points and propose smart solutions, I could easily validate assumptions and get quick feedback. And I add to my list of PO tasks another point “Represent the customer’s voice”. I guess that was enough, right? Wrong!
At one point, the company I was working acquired another one in the West coast. I was told that soon some vacancies will open for the same role as mine. However, when I tried to find the POs openings I couldn’t. Instead, I saw some “Product Manager” positions. I was a bit surprised, I wasn’t sure what a Product manager does on a daily basis, do I have to work with him, report to him? It was time for some more digging again.
Product management was introduced by Neil McElroy in 1930. Later on, other early tech companies such as Microsoft adopted Product Management disciplines. In 1991 Regis McKenna described a new type of marketing based on
- Synthesising technological capability with market needs
2. Bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”
What he was actually describing was Product Management and there is a need for a Product Manager. And some of the daily tasks are:
- Strategy Planning: develop and present the roadmap
- Investigation: competitors, technologies, market
- Data gathering and analysis: KPIs, dig in the DB, create reports, culculate costs
- Talk to stakeholders: clients, sales, marketing, security understand their needs and problems
Scrum derives directly from the Takeuchi and Nonaka paper in the Harvard Business Review, “The New New Product Development Game.” The best example in this paper is Honda and their style of product development. In Scrum, there is the Product Owner role.
I read a great article from Melissa Perri. Surprisingly enough, she had faced a similar situation like me and she wrote a great article about the difference between of PO and PM. And she explained as simple as this:
Product Owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product Manager is the job.
And she continues:
If you take your Scrum team away, as a process for your organisation, you are still a Product Manager. Product Management and Scrum work together well, but Product Management is not dependent on Scrum. It can and should exist with any framework or process.
At the end of the day …
Product Managers, Product Owners and Business Analyst have one thing in common: “Deliver value to the customer”. Whatever the role name is they must apply different methods for requirements gathering from internal or external stakeholders in order to make a great product.
They need to do research, data analysis, go thought documents to understand new regulations, RFPs or even go on clients site and see how they work and what are their daily pain points.They have to be informed about the market and the competitors and be aware of the state-of-the-art tools and technologies.
Based on that data they will be able to make the right decisions for their product and the teams that they lead. They will be able to prioritise the next steps accordingly and eliminate any risk.
Then they need to bring this knowledge to the development team and see together how to help the client to solve their problems. They need to work all together to some up will the best solutions and make a product succeed. And when the product is delivered they need to make sure that is used and validate all the assumptions that they made in the process of development.
To make a product that users use and solves real problem, companies need a good Product Management base. Having that as foundation companies can choose which framework they will work on and then define roles. The goal is the same, no matter the job title:
