How PO and PM are positioned in a development team?

Written by Izel Dean | Oct 27, 2022 4:01:01 AM

Scrum is a framework for scenarios where requirements and internal/external environments change rapidly, and quick delivery is required. According to "The 14th Annual State of Agile Report", 75% of survey respondents practice Scrum or a hybrid technique incorporating it. However, most companies do not have a Product Owner (PO), or think that a PO is equivalent to a Product Manager (PM) in an agile team and set up a PM only as a substitute for a PO.

So is PO equivalent to PM? What are the differences between them? How the two roles are positioned in a development team?

Understand the responsibilities of roles to create an excellent team

In rapid and iterative software development, a standard team should have both POs and PMs.

Originating from Scrum, PO is mainly responsible for "maximizing the value of a product". A PO should determine the development direction and vision for the product, define the content, priorities, and delivery dates of product releases, and be accountable for the ROI on the product. Acting as the CEO of a product, PO leads stakeholders through product conception, product modeling, and realization of product value in multiple dimensions, including operations, data, and market.

PM is the most common role in the IT industry, and is ultimately responsible for "delivering a good product to market". As the primary creator of product strategies and plans, PM, with a focus on user needs, transforms the product concept into usable features, and manages the product throughout its lifecycle. A PM should identify target customers and their needs, complete product requirement documents, prototypes and flow charts, detail product performance requirements, and finalize implementation plans to ensure that products are released efficiently with high quality.

Both PO and PM are indispensable to an enterprise. Only by clarifying responsibilities and ensuring a consistent team role assignment can we build an excellent product team to improve work efficiency. The following tips can assist POs and PMs incollaborating efficiently from scratch to continuously deliver high-value products to the market.

Collaborate efficiently to deliver high-value products

Tip #1. Share knowledge base and keep exploring

In the early stages of product development, PO prioritizes the stories in the product backlog, and the PM clarifies the details of the stories based on understanding of the PO's needs, converts the requirements into product deliverables, and discusses with architects, developers, testers, and operation personnel to create a feasible plan. In this process, the PO and PM need to jointly build knowledge base and sync project documents and knowledge.

ONES Wiki enables POs and PMs to create user stories, describe the product's functional architecture, market background, user needs, version management and plan, and give feedback quickly by commenting online. ONES Wiki can also be linked with the projects in ONES Project to allow users to insert issue tables into pages, quickly match requirements and documents, and improve the development management efficiency.

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Tip #2. Set up a collaboration platform to deliver products quickly

During product development, PO may change requirements to align with strategic goals or customer needs. To avoid delays, PO and PM need to build a platform for collaboration, visualize the development schedule, and identify and control the risks that affect the project progress as early as possible to achieve the management of the entire process from story creation to final delivery. WithONES Project, teams can create project milestones, monitor project progress, and ensure the fulfillment of the overall project goals.

Tip #3. Conduct a projectretrospective for continuous improvement

After the project is completed, the PO should, at the right time, work with the PM and team members to conduct a projectretrospective from different perspectives and summarize lessons to continuously improve the development process and achieve closed-loop development management. By providing quality reports and various data reports, ONES helps a team analyze problems encountered in the project, gain experience, and make plans for future improvements.

All in all, development management is a complex process that requires collaboration between POs and PMs to ensure stable development pace and business progress. ONES development management solution supports the whole process to facilitate the collaboration between roles including POs, PMs, developers, testers, and operation personnel for higher productivity, guaranteed product quality and quicker release of products.

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