As mentioned a few posts ago, I attended the Agile 2012 conference a few weeks ago. As far as I can see, one of the products of this movement has been the advent of the “Product Owner” role in the scrum team. This is someone who, as far as I can gather, does some of the work of the Product Manager, but is generally working much more closely to the Scrum team, guiding them with what they should be working on next.
There are various articles written on what the different roles in the area of product management and marketing should be doing. The Pragmatic Marketing Framework is a superb resource describing all of the different tasks that form part of these roles.
However, from reading a lot of these articles, many seem to be missing a fundamental point. In fact all of these roles, as I see it, are fundamentally the same – all are trying to figure out what are the features, benefits, propositions and messages that will make money from your product. If a product owner isn’t prioritising features that will make a difference to revenue (whether short term or long term) then she isn’t do her job properly. If the marketing person isn’t trying to craft propositions and messages that make some difference to the bottom line, then again, he is wasting his time. And more importantly if one of those people is ignoring factors outside of their traditional role, then this is something that needs addressing. Some of the most successful product marketing I’ve seen is where a product marketer suggests changes to the next sprint of the product or when a product owner has ideas about how to present features in a certain way, to certain types of people (maybe even writing the blog post herself).
To be honest, I find most of the conversations around defining job roles rather dull – as long as everyone is working on the same commercial goals, the nature of different peoples’ jobs tend to fall out pretty quickly based on what needs to be done.