SAFe Product Owner vs Product Manager: Key Differences

In the last ten years, I have travelled through the winding pathways of product roles in agile organizations. If there is any ambiguity regarding the differences between a SAFe Product Owner and a Product Manager, you are not the only one. Many organizations tend to conflate these positions which can be detrimental to the organization at large. I will address the details of this confusion today and put it to rest.

Before getting into the details, let us highlight the difference between SAFe Product Owner or Product Manager:

This is the table I use without fail to illustrate the roles to executives and other new team members. When the gaps are positioned next to each other for glance, they are far more intuitive.

Within SAFe, the Product Owner has an important and unique function that is distinct from traditional product management. After working with an extensive range of SAFe Product Owners, I can tell you that the top performers certainly have common traits.

The SAFe Product Owner acts as the primary link of the "what" (defined by the Product Manager) and the "how", which is done by the development team. They convert business and user needs into actionable tasks that development teams can work on.

Let's walk through what a day in the life of a SAFe Product Owner looks like:

• Conducting a morning stand-up with the development team to resolve blockers
• Refinement sessions aimed at resolving user story and acceptance criteria ambiguities
• Discussion with UX designers regarding features in the pipeline
• Verification of the completed work against the defined acceptance criteria
• Tactical optimization of the team backlog based on business value
• Stakeholder communication concerning progress towards Sprint Goals

My top performing Product Owners have always been people with rich and deep technical expertise who are also great communicators. They guard user needs but have to understand the development constraints.

These are the common challenges I have noticed:

• Stakeholder pressures to increase scope within a single sprint.
• Struggle with quantifying business value for the purpose of prioritization.
• Managing inter-team dependencies.
• Balancing immediate technical requirements and user-facing features.
• Obtaining adequate access to the Product Manager for tactical leadership.

With regards to the SAFe Product Owner role, they will flourish when they have the ability to make decisions at the team level while still being able to see and understand the product on a higher level. I have seen organizations undermine this role by not allowing Product Owners the freedom to make decisions and imposing too many Product Owners under one Product Manager. Proficiency in product owner tools like JIRA, Rally, and Azure DevOps is essential for effective backlog management and team coordination.

The opposite is true for the Product Manager role which sits at a more tactical level. The SAFe Product Owner concentrates on execution in a given sprint or program increment, while the Product Manager concentrates on what needs to be done in the future for the product.

It reminds me of the time I collaborated with one superb Product Manager who, out of the building, spent 70% of her time on customer conversations, competitor tracking, and market trends. The fact that a person has an external focus is a Product Manager giveaway.

The key responsibilities of a Product Manager include:

• Conducting research to assess trends, gaps and competitors
• Setting product vision and product strategy
• Developing and continuously updates the product roadmap
• Developing business opportunities for new projects
• Upholding stakeholder expectations throughout the organization
• Setting pricing and go-to-market execution
• Evaluating product performance against KPIs

In my experience, the best Product Managers are those with a deep understanding of the business and an exceptional level of technical literacy. While coding is not essential, Strategic Technologists need to know enough about the technology industry to make decisive strategic choices.

Other primary key differentiators of outstanding Product Managers are:

• Strategic foresight and vision formulation
• Market research and customer experience insights
• Finances, especially modeling ROI
• Communication and presentation at an executive level
• Leadership across the functional space without a formal title
• Managing conflicting priorities from various stakeholder groups

A successful Product Manager is normally judged against key performance indicators such as market share, revenue, customer satisfaction and adoption rates. This differs significantly from how a Product Owner measures and values sprint velocity and feature completion.

During my career, I have learned that the differences between a SAFe Product Owner and Product Manager largely come out in terms of:

1. Terminal Decision Powers

A Product Manager makes decision on what gets built and why. The Product Owner decides when specific items will be built based on their team's capacity. This difference is important—there is a lack of clarity around this boundary in myriad cases and the resulting conflict is disastrous.

In one of the organizations I consulted for, the chaos on the Product Manager's roadmap was a direct result of the Product Owners committing features with no consultation. In another the Product Owners were circumvented by the Product Manager who directly allocated work to Developers which disempowered the team.

2. Strategic vs Tactical Orientation

The more strategic a role becomes, the farther out in the future the time horizon tends to extend. Market analysis, studying competitors, and forecasting multiple quarters or years down the line are things that come under the Product Manager's responsibility. The Product Owner concentrates on the short-term which is inward; refining the next sprint, clarifying requirements, quality delivery assurance.

This is how I explain it: a Product Manager is analogous to a ship's captain who sets the overall route and destination while the Product Owner is a navigator tasked with plotting a very specific course through the surrounding waters.

3. Documentation and Artifacts

Different roles give rise to different documents:

The above artefacts makes it clearer who is responsible for what which helps to minimize inefficiencies due to duplication of roles.

In my view, the confusion between SAFe Product Owner and Product Manager arises primarily from these aspects:

• Feature prioritization – Each role has a say in determining what is built but the Product Manager should provide higher level strategic guidance while the Product Owner executes.
• Stakeholder management – Both engage with stakeholders, albeit on different levels. Cross-functional and executive stakeholders are handled by Product Managers, while development team stakeholders are primarily dealt with by Product Owners.
• Customer Interaction - Understanding the customer is important for both roles but differs in focus – Product Managers look at market-level insights while Product Owners review customers' interactions with specific features.
• Change Management - In case of shifting business needs, who gets to change the order of priorities? This is essential to define in order to eliminate ambiguity.

I witnessed this confusion unfold in a dramatic way at a financial services company where several Product Owners in isolation made promises with clients regarding feature availability without consulting their Product Manager. This resulted in an impossible roadmap and caused a loss of trust with the customers when deadlines were not met.

"Defining clear roles is not bureaucratic— it is foundational to achieving effective teamwork. The faster the all the team members in the organization navigate to their designated lanes, the faster the entire team moves." This is a quote from one of the strongest CTOs I have worked with.

The collaboration between SAFe Product Owners and Product Managers is optimized with the following practices:

• Alignment with Product Manager and Owner Objectives - I advise for weekly product sweat sessions with the respective Product Manager and Owner to ensure there is alignment for strategy as well as execution.
• Role Delineation: Documented Decision Process - Outlining what decisions each role can make individually and what decisions need to be made jointly requires clear documentation.
• Cross-Role Tools - Documented design decisions that allow for cross-role view provide shared accessibility from stratty execution.
• Engagement with customers - Integrate product owners into customer research activities from time to time to observe the user's needs directly.
• Escalation paths - Establish unambiguous routes for settling disputes concerning priorities or asks.

A common question that I receive is: Who earns more: an SAFe Product Owner or a Product Manager?

From the industry data and my experience, I can conclude:

• Product Managers, on average, earn 15-30% more than Product Owners
• Product Manager roles usually ask for additional years of relevant experience
• Product Manager roles also appear to have greater influence on compensation elements such as bonuses aligned with the profitability of the product.

The Product owner career path typically is as follows:

1. Business Analyst or Technical Team Member
2. Junior Product Owner
3. Senior Product Owner
4. Associate Product Manager
5. Product Manager
6. Senior Product Manager
7. Director of Product

I've advised a number of Product Owners who are able to move up to Product Manager successfully by:

• Getting access to the workings of primary market research and customer development
• Acquiring skills for financial modeling and developing business cases
• Assuming responsibilities related to inter-team coordination
• Formulating business strategies based on formal training or side projects

For those looking to make this transition, I suggest trying to follow Product Managers during their planning sessions and request to sit in on strategic discussions.

The execution of Product Owner versus Product Manager in SAFe model differs across industries:

Software Companies

• More technical Product Managers
• Product Owners with Development background
• Vertical split between strategic and tactical roles is clearer

Financial Services

• Comes with added complexity due to regulatory compliance for both roles
• Heavy focus on risk management for Product Owners
• Deeper domain knowledge required for Product Managers

Healthcare

• Need to take into account patient safety, impacting both roles
• Clinically inclined Product Owners
• Multiple patient, provider, and payer stakeholders for Product Managers

Retail/Ecommerce

• Emphasis on conversion-centric Product Managers
• Frequent release cycle managing Product Owners
• Work closely with marketing in both roles

In societies today, I've observed that successful companies seem to take an industry context approach to SAFe role definitions rather than impose strict hierarchical role delineations that are counterproductive to business reality.

Here's how I foresee the dynamic around SAFe Product Owner versus Product Manager changing based on my observations within the sector:

• Impact of AI and Automation – Automated tools will cut down on manual work for both roles, with Product Owners using AI for backlog vetting and Product Managers employing it for tactical market assessment.
• Remote or Distributed Teams – As teams become more global, Customer Support Specialists and Assistants become more connected to customers whereas Product Owners will require more sophisticated skills for managing guidance processes.
• Increasing Technical Complexity – The integration of technologies such as AI and IoT into products will require deeper technical knowledge for both roles.
• Shift to Continuous Delivery – Organizations that adopt complete continuous delivery and 'blink-and-you'll-miss-it' experimentation may use the terms Product Owner and Product Manager interchangeably.
• Data-Driven Decision Making – Both roles will need to adopt a more data-driven approach, with the emphasis being market data for the Product Manager and metrics based on team performance for the Product Owner.

Anticipating these changes within their product teams gives organizations a clear competitive edge. I am particularly keen on the prospect of AI tools freeing both positions from non-productive work enabling them to concentrate on creating value.

The difference between the SAFe Product Owner and Product Manager roles is not merely a question of terminology; it defines an approach to efficient product development at scale. We have analyzed these roles in this article in terms of their focus, responsibilities, and skills.

To capture the primary distinctions:

• Product Managers are responsible for the "what" and "why" (strategy)
• Product Owners are accountable for the "when" and "how" (execution)
• Product Managers monitor the horizon and look outward
• Product Owners monitor the rearview and look inward and short term

These organizations reap tangible rewards when these roles are well defined and effective collaboration is nurtured between them:

• Improved decision speed
• Enhanced strategy-execution alignment
• Elevated employee satisfaction
• Improved meeting predictability
• Superior fit between product and market

I have tailored this comparison to those wishing to shift from Product Owner to Product Manager, design their product organization, or simply grasp the nuances of these roles in SAFe organizations.

Always remember, the objective is not strict adherence to predefined roles, but rather the establishment of conditions in which products can thrive, through effective collaboration and clear accountability.