I really like this post Agile Product Owner and Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise that highlights the organizational issue of trying to staff agile product owners in the enterprise’s technology organization. Staffed this way, product owners are bound to contend with product managers because their responsibilities somewhat overlap. On the other hand, trying to get a product manager to take on the responsibilities of an agile product owner often does not work because of the time commitments (good product owners spend a significant part of their time – 66%? – with the tech organization) and because of the needed technical skills.The post does a good job going into the details and so they are not worth repeating in this post, but here is my two cents on a solution. Most technology departments have project managers who often are (and should be in my opinion) technical and are also good business analysts. These project managers should be spending a good deal of their time understanding the business requirements and overseeing the schedule and deliverables of the technology team. Project managers that have these capabilities can take on the role and responsibility of product owner. What’s more, a good product manager should embrace this structure as it frees him/her up from getting in the weeds on implementation and allows them to focus more on product strategy. The product manager may object to assigning a project manager a role titled ‘product owner’, but hopefully a good org chart and description of responsibilities can alleviate this tension.

In this structure the product owner / project manager becomes more of the story curator than the story writer. I’ll elaborate in another post. Looking forward to Dean Leffingwell’s solution to this key issue.