Ten years ago I tried to visualize the difference between a product manager and business analyst. That diagram had some overlap between the roles but left many things on either side of Venn diagram overlap. In the years since the popularity of the product owner role has skyrocketed (peaked perhaps?). On a recent call with a client (large, multi-national, legacy financial services) a debate arose between the distribution of responsibilities between, now, three roles – business analyst, product manager and product owner. Ten years ago I would have worked to separate specific work to specific individuals. Today, in 2024, we are all product managers now.
Forcing a division reduces collaboration and shared understanding
I once worked with a company where the product manager role was an outward facing role. In other words, their responsibility was to interface with the customer and the market. They would do competitive analyses, speak to customers, run experiments and define the product vision and goals. The product owners in the same company faced inward. They were the liaison with the development team. This included the designers. The only insight into the “outside world” as it were for the product development team was the product owner. They defined specific requirements, wrote user stories, prioritized them in a backlog and managed the project plan. This company also had business analysts. Every feature had to be run past them to ensure it followed business rules, regulations and any other domain-specific constraints.
The development team had information coming at them from 3 different directions. All of that information was filtered through a single point – the product owner – who inevitably editorialized it to fit their vision for success (hey, they’re only human). Once the team produced something the product owner would share it with the product manager, business analyst and eventually other stakeholders to see how it met their needs. The back and forth cycle was slow, prone to miscommunication and misunderstandings. It kept the teams from talking to each other and to the outside world because every one of these 3 roles kept access to “their” information and insight well guarded. Otherwise, what was the point of their job? My current client’s situation was identical.
The biggest losers in this situation were the product development teams and ultimately the customers. The team never had a clear sense of why they were doing certain work or why direction had changed. Getting anything clarified took days and sometimes weeks – time that could have been spent refining the product and getting it to market. There was no shared conversation which meant no shared understanding. The system was broken because of roles defined to separate the work rather than bring it together.
We are all product managers now
If you work in any capacity that seeks to understand the market, discover gaps and opportunities, define a product vision and lead the process of making that vision a reality in a compelling way to your customers, you are a product manager. The specific responsibilities will vary between companies and industries. Your level of technical expertise, domain knowledge and customer understanding will also fluctuate based on the specifics of your context. You will do work that was once covered by business analysts. You will undoubtedly do what product owners have been defined to do. And, despite its malleability and squishiness, you will also be doing product management work. We need a name for all of it. That name is product manager.
The more we divide the role the less successful the end result will be. We need a person building an inclusive, diverse discussion with everyone involved in the making of a product. We need to eliminate the territoriality of roles. We can’t divide our perspective into outward and inward-facing ones. And, most importantly, we can’t keep our teams away from the customer.
My guess is that those who currently carry the product manager title will nod along in agreement with this post. My other guess is that those of you holding product owner and business analyst titles will resist this idea and likely poke some reasonable, well-intentioned holes in my very short argument. I’m ready to hear it. Before you do that, though, please consider how your argument ultimately makes for a better customer experience and successful business. Ok? Let’s go.
30 responses to “We are all product managers now”
The thing is, until people came in and introduced the PO and BA , there wasn’t confusion and PMs worked as described.
I’m a Product Owner myself.
I fully agree with your article. I think it doesn’t matter which title (PM, PO) someone has.
One important thing that matters is that there should be only 1 person responsible for the PM/PO tasks. Otherwise it gets unclear for everybody
I think it makes a whole lot of sense. The functions of these different people are sometimes interwoven that you cannot really separate one from the other.
My view is that when you look at the history of how PM’s do what they do today – its evident that most of the technological breakthroughs of the yesteryears needed someone other than engineers, designers and technical folks to decrypt what technology is unlocking for business. That is where the PM’s came to be – to help the world about what tech was doing.
The difference now is that breakthroughs aren’t going to be because of merely technological advancements with democratisation of tech – its going to be where the Customer, Insights and Business are lined up – and that alignment comes from the PM.
Hence I completely echo what Jeff has highlighted that the roles have somewhat merged and consolidated.
The product leadership now expects senior product managers and above, to be responsible for product discovery until product launch & beyond. This is, in a way, great as it empowers the product manager. However, playing the roles of a BA, PO and PM is going to be overwhelming for the product managers. So having the BAs and POs (who eventually can graduate to become PM) reporting into PMs, looks like a good learning path for BAs and POs IMO.
Exactly, PM need time for new product discovery, its impact on user base and overall revenue generation, user experience, new features for existing products and its impact, product adoption, user interviews and so on. By putting extra responsibilities, we will loose some of the other expect towards new products discovery or new features identification.
You precisely nailed it. I am new to the world of product management and have found the titles confusing. Who are the subordinates to a PM, in my perceived structure, i would have a product analyst taking the end to end role from gathering customer insights to being part of the development team. This product analyst reports to the PM. Why do you think of this structure, otherwise PM would be overwhelmed?
The division of work also depends on how much specificity the Development team needs. I work as a PO with a small offshore team and they want very detailed requirements and expect me to tell them field validations, parameter names etc. This leaves little time for me to focus on client needs and creating a roadmap. Hence, my department has 2 Product Managers.
I’ll table the PO vs PM argument, agree with you there. But for a BA, couldn’t this just be an augmentation of PM responsibilities. Consider a situation where a PM is more business outward focused and a BA is more technical inward focused. Feature is to develop a complex API integration but story and requirements specification can only be efficiently done by the BA as they have a more technical background? Obv I would prefer my PMs to be more well rounded but sometimes this isn’t the case
What are your thoughts?
The Tech lead and Product manager defining this together.
They key here is the word product. Businesses have more than one product so they need more than one product manager. Having one product manager try to manage dozens of products is going to lead to lots of problems and confusion.
What about Scrum Masters. Even though they are not people managers, they are Scrum Ceremonies managers and thus they impact project and teams performance.
The main problem with this IMO is one person can’t do all the work. That leads to a poorer customer experience, because things are late or incorrectly designed, leading to rework. If this works for a better customer experience, why not merge all the developer, project manager and product manager jobs?
Agree to your point. Expecting PM to write stories and business rule validation will consume all his/ her time with little less opportunity to think and study on new features, innovations.
Agree with above comment. Product Managers did everything before random full time job titles like product owner came around. We never needed a single person to fullfill the roles of product owner, project manager or program manager. Those were the role of a single person.
What’s old is new again.
I think what differentiates a PM in a lot of orgs is their focus on technical awareness and coding. I know of some orgs that have coding interviews for PMs. PO and BA are purely generalist roles, from what I understand, with little need for technical know how. I’m currently working as a Finance BA, and as someone who’d like to explore the PM field would love to be wrong about this.
Is there enough hours in the day to do all of that work as a single person? Doing all the competitive analysis, customer interviews, vision and strategy, design workshops, project reports, backlog management, requirements writing, success metrics and okrs, data analysis, dashboard creation, etc etc. there is a reason companies have more roles and it’s because one person trying to do everything is going to do it all badly and slowly and burn themselves out.
I’m not saying BAs and POs are good roles to have. And I agree the more roles you have the more process and bureaucracy you get. but having a single person doing everything doesn’t work either. You can have researchers doing some customer interviews but will they go deep enough if they aren’t the pm? You can have a data analyst build your dashboards but will they understand the insight you’re trying to gain? You can have a product owner or junior pm manage your backlog but will they be able to communicate the vision and make good decisions on what scope can be cut? Delegating work and introducing more roles always comes with downsides and a risk they will do it wrong. That doesn’t mean you should be an island.
Completely agree.
I agree!
I like the original post in that it underlines the pitfall all 3 should collaborate better and avoid for the sake of development team and customers. Regardless of what you call them you still need more than one individual to do all of that work. What’s the alternative in that case? Divide by features?
Thank you for putting this brave post.
I couldn’t agree more!
I have always wondered why we need to build these walls and boundaries when the goal is one.
Who’s stopping a BA to add value as a product owner or a product manager or vice versa.
Sadly most people think of these roles as some kind of hierarchy and moving from one to the other is quite impossible. Within the same firm one might get promoted (again that shows heirarchy) but if one is external no way it is possible.
I believe role is defined based on the project scope and organization requirements. If the project scope is large then PO and BA would be needed.
I agree to have one person instead of three. Which title that person will have is less important than responsibilities which must cover all three previous roles.
Before I knew about the PM role I was working within it, just made sense – I agree with the above more roles were created and it got much more complicated.
Reasonable perspective, but when the RACI comes out which defines who is “Responsible” I expect the Business Analyst and Product Owner will take a step back, leaving the Product Manager standing out in front, and responsible. Which is where I would expect them to be.
I think you should also have considered the project delivery approach(waterfall/Agile) here for more clarity on your points.
If you are working on a software development project- which you would at best use a scrum framework(no hierarchy), then a BA & PO will be relevant.
However, if it’s a waterfall approach for maybe a project that has predictable solutions- yes, a PM alone will be fine.
Hopefully, you ready to pay more to the PM for overtime🙂
The book TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model gives a good view on how organizations can work in a true product model.
But wouldn’t that put burden on a single person and will he not be expected to answer everthing?
I agree in spirit to this article but these job roles are still very very vaguely defined and responsibilities are much more unclear..in some companies all three are requried (but still confusion on role specifics still exists) and in some ..one role is enough..Agile demolished few roles, created some which are not cojusive for every organization.Agile never addressed clarity of roles under the disguise of colllective leadership & influencing without authority (A misnomer)
I am a BA and I agree with the PM role definition. And I would like to call BA as PM. But due to increased responsibilities and large teams, it becomes difficult for one person to handle everything. Therefore there’s the need to have all three roles working in sync. This causes incoherence and friction sometimes though, something which is highlighted in the article.
[…] Source: We are all product managers now […]
What is encapsulated by what?
– Management encapsulates ownership, or
– Ownership encapsulates management
Ownership implies ultimate authority, accountability, and decision-making power. The problem is that we name people as Product Owners, but strip them off or deny those traits. Adding to the mix that the Product Manager is the go-to in case of product vision and strategy only contributes to this confusion.
While management duties can be broad and some responsibilities can be delegated to a variety of managers, accountability remains at the real of ownership. The change and name of the Product Owner always was intended to highlight that the person who has this accountability has the final say over the product and others must respect that (however everyone still can try to influence PO).