Career direction: Product Manager / Product Owner

[Tim Cognito]

I have worked for a small ecommerce company for the last 13 years, being a small company you have to be a bit of a jack of all trades and i've probably been covering 3 or 4 different roles during that time.

My primary role has been ecommerce manager to grow online sales but as all our client sites are run on our own ecommerce platform which we have built from the ground up, I have done a massive amount of what I believe is product management (I only heard the term a couple of months ago ).

Briefly, I would take client ideas/user problems, spec them out properly with consideration of integration into existing features or broadening the scope so the feature can have wider applications, sign off UX designs, liaise with developers, carry out acceptance testing, all throughout communicating with stakeholders on progress/outcomes etc. For those of you who are PM/POs, does this sound roughly in line with your responsibilities?

I am aware that although I have a lot of hands on experience, I would describe my current place of work as insular and out of touch with modern practices, I am currently buffing up on agile/scrum as that seems to be the industry standard which I have limited experience in - we use Jira/Confluence, but a kind of b***stardised version of scrum which I am not that involved with.

I would be interested to hear anyone's experience if they work in either of these roles, what industry do you do it in? What do you like? What don't you like? What is your salary?

[aproctor1]

"Product" is a very broad church and seems to differ a lot by organisation.

Tech companies seem to implement it the best, much like Procurement in manufacturing, but outside of its natural habitat, you could be a pseudo Project Manager or BA.

I would search some JDs and read the job spec, typically Agile/Scrum and some logical analytical skills are the common theme.

Also, John Cutler on Linkedin is somebody that is worth following.

[conanius]

Disclaimer:

This might read as buzzword nonsense, if it does, don't hate me too badly, but I'm trying to give you the detail you should go and read up on. Very happy to have a chat with you about this elsewhere if you wish.

Context:

I've got 20 years experience in IT Service Management, ITIL V4 at Expert Level, etc.

In ~2017 I 'found' Agile after doing an introduction course, and started to get my head around things like DevOps (initially by reading the Phoenix Project). In 2018 I returned to an old employer as a Product Owner (Contract) in a line of business I had SME knowledge in. I'm now in a Product Manager role (Contract) in that same area.

Certifications wise, I've followed the Scrum Alliance certification path, and now hold CSP-PO and all 3 of the Agile Leadership certifications they offer. For my sins I've also got certs in Kanban and SAFe.

Detail:

I'll be a bit blunt, but please take it as constructive. Whilst I've got the certs, I'm not one to quote the book, but if you even did a CSPO course, you'd realise why I'm saying this. Firstly, Product Owners and Product Managers are quite different roles.

Product Owners are (typically, when the role title is used 'correctly' are part of the Scrum Team doing the development). They're the 'one voice' of the business who sets direction and orders work. Done properly, they're the one person with total authority to say 'no', and usually spend most of the time telling users/customers this. IME, a good Product Owner will empower the development team to find solutions to business problems, not just spend their lives saying 'do that, then that, then that' in a very prescriptive fashion. Sometimes, having intrinsic knowledge to know the product works 'under the hood' can cause conflict/impact the morale of developers. Typically, to do a decent job of this, you need to be a full time Product Owner, and usually, only for a single product (obviously, there are huge variables at play with this statement).

Product Managers, are usually a bit more strategic in their day to day work, maybe they have Product Owners reporting into them, maybe they're accountable for the end to end value stream and they use things like OKRs to drive progress in a certain direction. In my experience, if as a Product Owner you have 5-8 people looking at you for direction, as a Product Manager you have 50-100. Thats slightly untrue as scaled agile approaches can of course have multiple development teams looking to a single Product Owner, but you get the idea.

The caveat with all this is, HR and Senior Leaders get their hands on some words and put words like 'senior' infront of these titles, use them interchangeably, etc and it just results in total madness.

I would say, I only really 'get away' with being a contract product owner because of my past experience. Would I want a brand new fresh face who had never been in my business to make fundamental choices on our entire product strategy... probably not for the long term but definitely to coach a perm on how to do it the right way. If I wasn't an SME in what I do, I doubt I'd have this role (I'm one of the only contract ones in the organisation I'm in).

Do I like the work? I love it. I've been part of a massive agile transformation and it's been both exhausting and exhilarating - I might be a workaholic, but for me you need to enjoy work else its a life sentence in dull nonsense.

It's the longest time in my career I have stayed in a single area. I was a senior manager leading most of a company prior to this, but wanted a chance to do something very different

Salary is as a result of all the above, wildly variable. I've been cold approached by Recruiters at anything from £50-£100k when its Product focused, but equally I've also had people chatting about roles >100k because of the other skills and experiences I have.

In terms of contract rate, I'm in the range the previous poster listed - but would say typically, Product Owners are ~£450-650 PD and Product Managers £600-800 PD.

Edited by conanius on Tuesday 3rd October 15:41

[Tim Cognito]

conanius said:

Disclaimer:

Snipped

Edited by conanius on Tuesday 3rd October 15:41

Thank you very much for the reply, sorry I had not had a chance to respond. Most of my free time has been taken up applying for a couple of product owner jobs.

I will look into CSPO but I do get what you mean about quoting the book. Being overly prescriptive and rigid with process isn't really an agile approach is it?

Interesting point about empowering the development team, probably guilty of that in my current role as I know (or think I know) how it works under the hood and the best way to achieve what I want from the product. It is a difficult line to tread though, between being too vague and too specific with the job spec? Before we started working more to the scrum process with user stories we used to just write out a "spec" which described what we wanted from a product, which tended to be quite long and detailed. I do sometimes find user stories challenging in that regard when it is reduced down to a short punchy "As a user, I want X, so that I can do Y."

Seems to be lots of Product Owner roles being advertised in the public sector, coming from an often chaotic start up where it was a bit like the wild west will take some getting used to.

[mikef]

My background is in product companies, rather than the public sector (do they build products?). Do you have knowledge of a specific business area or market? I’d suggest looking at job postings from vendors in that market. Go to the company’s website, rather than job boards and personally I’d always apply direct, not through an agency.

Talking of books, you could gen up on Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG)’s publications, starting with Inspired

[conanius]

Tim Cognito said:

Interesting point about empowering the development team, probably guilty of that in my current role as I know (or think I know) how it works under the hood and the best way to achieve what I want from the product. It is a difficult line to tread though, between being too vague and too specific with the job spec? Before we started working more to the scrum process with user stories we used to just write out a "spec" which described what we wanted from a product, which tended to be quite long and detailed. I do sometimes find user stories challenging in that regard when it is reduced down to a short punchy "As a user, I want X, so that I can do Y."

Seems to be lots of Product Owner roles being advertised in the public sector, coming from an often chaotic start up where it was a bit like the wild west will take some getting used to.

I can't see the wood for the trees on what I wrote, but my role is in the Public Sector. That in turn makes things fun when weighting a feature as measurement of value becomes a bit more varied than 'it saves us £x' - or whatever.

In terms of empowerment, let me elaborate a bit further - please accept this is contrived:

Sprint Goal - "Double the processing throughput".

I'm not going to guess what pieces of work would achieve that outcome. I'm going to leave it to the Developers to work it out. They are the experts with the mechanics of the product.

Equally, I try and ensure any teams I work with actually feel confident to call things out - As an example one of the first 'changes' I make is I ensure the sprint items start of with some of the items from the retrospective, and any bugs or defects that the development team and articulate to me are slowing them down.

Standing at the front saying no no yes yes and guessing what needs to be done is what I've seen many a product owner do, and eventually they come unstuck. Sure they make progress down their vision that probably gets them a merit badge from a senior, but when the team atrophies as it's an awful environment looking after an unsustainable product in a dictatorship..... you get the idea.

(I"m not suggesting you work that way, just trying to explain my point).

I think it probably helps me a lot that I do this role for enjoyment, and as with many contractors I'm doing a role several levels below my capability and past experience as a perm. I truly believe its actually quite a complex role, and unless you get decent coaching and support, its easy for your to decimate a capability.

[the-photographer]

Tim Cognito said:

I would be interested to hear anyone's experience if they work in either of these roles, what industry do you do it in? What do you like? What don't you like? What is your salary?

To repeat other posters, its a big church, think labour through to conservative and the definition is very dependent on the organisation.

Product manager might actually mean product marketing because development is a separate team with its own leadership.

Product owner might mean a scrum master type role, but with marketing and sales being managed elsewhere.

You will like the role if you like a varied workload (sales, marketing, development, business development, customer liaison) the downside being that any question or problem that doesn't fit will land on your desk.

Salaries are equally varied, senior role in London could be 75k+ junior role elsewhere could be 30k Ten minutes on indeed will give you an idea