Product Owner vs Product Manager – Differences and Similarities in App Development

Product Manager vs. Product Owner; do they have unique responsibilities or are they just the same roles with different names? The question is as old as the mobile app development subspace itself. If you’ve found yourself puzzled with the same question, you can read this article to learn all about the similarities and differences between these positions.

Nowadays, corporations have become really inventive in coming up with attractive titles for various job positions. One of these eye-catching roles is the title of product manager. Over the past years, many companies have started hiring employees for the roles of product managers. But was this really necessary, considering product owners have already existed? The answer is:

 YES!

Despite the fact that these positions might fairly seem identical, as it turns out, product owners and product managers are actually distinct positions. What’s more, they are responsible for carrying out different responsibilities. That said, it should be noted that the terms product manager and product owner are often used interchangeably, and their tasks may sometimes overlap.

For most, there is an open debate about the division of the two roles, and there are numerous competing definitions for these positions. But for the record, most agree on one basic difference, that is:

The PO or the project owner has a more tactical approach and tends to focus mainly on product goals. They are responsible for turning product managers’ strategies into life by guiding the development team on how and what they need to do.

On the other hand, the product manager has a strategic approach. Their main responsibility is to conduct the entire product management process and help the company achieve its targets.

Let’s further explore these roles and delve into their responsibilities with respect to app development individually.

Role of a Product Owner in App Development:

The product Officer is actually the person who is responsible for making the decisions for the entire development process. The main goal of all these choices is to make sure the developmental team creates a quality product that has the potential to solve the target audience’s problems and suits them best.

Duties Of a Product Owner:

In an app development project, the product owner is required to perform the following responsibilities

• Administrating and creating backlogs.
• Appearing in team management meetings.
• Organizing demonstrations.
• Ensuring requirements are ready to be met by doing appropriate analysis.
• Being involved with enduring testing efforts.
• Recognizing and ordering app development backlogs based on business needs, value, and ROI.
• Managing functionality for tracking user stories in a sprint.
• Communication of the business targets and product ideas.
• Translating customer demands into functionality by Engaging with customers.
• Strategizing, evaluating, and guiding development team meetings
• A constant analysis of app development progress.
• Analyzing the backlog and deciding what functionality will be developed next.
• Integrating business mission and market preferences into the project.
• Keeping contact with all investors regarding the app development program.
• Budgeting of app development and keeping track of time at each step.

Role of a Product Manager in App Development:

Product managers are responsible for strategically influencing development, market release, improvement, and making constant back-ups of the application. They are focused on coming up with long-term strategies, plans, project ideas, and improvements to provide a better user experience.

Product managers are keen to observe market trends, identifying potential scope for modification of the product to support greater sales and popularity among users.

Duties Of a Product Manager:

• Mobile application marketing.
• Product vision.
• Identification and discovery of customers.
• Cooperating company objectives into specialized application features.
• Optimizing the application to satisfy the requirement of the users and the organization.
• Supporting Application purchases.
• Accounting for the marketing campaigns.
• Longterm forecasting.
• Supporting the solution-delivery team.
• Making decisions about compromising on time, features, and costs to enhance application sales.
• Customer care and support.

Product Owner as a Key Team Member of the Client Side

The client-side team is responsible for ensuring that the end product caters to the customer’s demands in all application development projects. The product owner act as the voice of the customer and therefore is a vital member of this team.

Their job is to collect customer feedback and communicate their requirements to the development team. They also contribute significantly to the testing and acceptance of the product features.

Along with their duties on the client-side team, product owners also sometimes need to network with other investors, such as business analysts and project managers.

Product owners are, without a doubt, indispensable members of any successful application development team. As such, they play an important role in ensuring that all parties get along with each other and are on the same page with the project’s objective.

Benefits of having a Product Owner from the Client side

Close links with the sponsors and relevant other parties

The product owner is likely to have the advantage of having profound knowledge and understanding about who might have the answer to certain issues. This benefit is the result of being in close proximity to the sponsors and stakeholders.

He will be able to ask the right questions to the right people. Having this kind of connection and understanding will lead him to easily derive solutions to many problems and prevent the situation from getting out of hand.

He can control mishaps before they even take place and stop confrontations from escalating.

Secret Business Insights

Obviously, an insider will always be more educated and accustomed to the client’s company and culture; he would have a sound knowledge of the competitors and clients. This is why he would be able to make better and more efficient product development decisions.

Greater autonomy for the development team:

As the product owner is understood to be the client’s representative, he is trusted by both sides. He can easily lead both the functional and business side. This sync will ultimately result in more profit for the company.

Better visibility into production feature use

While developing an application, several modifications are made in order to satisfy its intended use. At this stage, sharing information with an insider will enable us to get important leads to enhance our product even more. Apart from that, it’s always better to share with an insider rather than someone from the outside.

Why Is There a Need for Both Product Manager and Product Owner?

Job seekers fail to understand the difference between Product owner and manager, while companies are often confused about whether to hire one or both.

Recent studies have shown that having both a product manager and a product owner is the most beneficial for an organization. How? Let’s find out:

Having separate people for these roles helps boost the company’s performance in two ways:

Greater Efficiency

Businesses employing product managers and product owners become more active by developing more products and improving the entire procedure.

In the presence of both, the development teams can have a better idea about the requirements, empowering the team to generate focus to a much greater extent.

Consistency

When communication is efficient between the shareholders and the development teams, both product owners and product managers guarantee that the development and feedback are consistent.

This allows the company to produce the final product flawlessly, and results in better performance.

Characteristics Of an Exceptional Product Owner and Product Manager:

There are certain qualities that will accelerate your career while being a product manager or product owner. Incorporate these rituals into your process and see the results for yourself.

In order for product owners and product managers to gain employment opportunities and become exceptional professionals, they need to have these qualities for sure.

Starting With a Plan:

Start by deriving a strategy. Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. Therefore, think beforehand and refrain your self from making hasty and rash decisions.

Always make sure that you are aware of all your company’s current product objectives and what you are going after. Plan accordingly and ace the process!

Putting Yourself in the Shoes of Customers:

Having strong empathy toward your clients is a must. You can’t achieve your goals without them. When you care about customers’ wants and well-being, you automatically strive to develop a product that best benefits them.

To get an idea, you can observe sales calls, meet actual customers, ask them how’s their experience going, what they would like to be improved, and get feedback.

A deep understanding of customers’ needs requires more than a month’s worth of time and tons of effort. But you’ll start getting results in the first few weeks, which will enable you to achieve more sales.

Developing an Authentic Relationship with Your Coworkers

In order to prosper in the position of a product manager or product owner, not only is teamwork required, but it’s impossible to get work done without it.

It’s impossible to succeed by yourself, as you depend on your team and application developers to create the appropriate product.

Therefore, you are required to form healthy and authentic relationships with your colleagues. Deep and profound connections generate trust and result in effective communication. This will enable you to lead your team towards righteous success.

Learning to Say No:

Being in a managerial role like the product officer and product manager, you’ll get numerous requests from all over the firm, such as requesting new features or enhancements. Apart from that, you’ll be hearing from the clients too.

You have to realize that no matter how efficient you are, you can’t satisfy everyone. What you need to do is learn how to prioritize your tasks and identify what’s more important. Don’t stress yourself out, and get comfortable saying ‘no’ or ‘not now.’

Taking Your Time

Do not expect immediate success and get disheartened if you don’t achieve it. Just believe in yourself and stay persistent. Adjusting and advancing in a new role takes consistency. Just follow the above steps and repeat.

Give yourself the time to become the organization’s most effective product specialist. have patience and trust the process.

The Final Verdict: What’s the Real Difference Between a Product Owner vs. a Product Manager?

The debate over where a product manager’s role ends and a product owner begins—or whether or not these two functions are just two different aspects of the same position—will probably go on forever.

We admit that the two terms being used interchangeably have led to confusion between the latter.

But we hope that now with the help of this article, you must’ve gotten a sound idea about all the differences and similarities between a product owner and a product manager.

Quick review: The owner will make sure that the product fits the market and the requirements, while the manager is responsible for guiding the development teams. They both work towards the same goal, yet, there are some differences between the two that can’t be ignored.

As we have learned, both roles are necessary for an organization’s success. However, sometimes a single person can perform both of these roles for a firm.

What really matters is that your product organization has a team structure that works for your process and that the product managers and the product owners in your team know the responsibilities and goals for their roles.