What a product owner does
Product owners bring the vision of a product to life. Their job is to ensure things are done on a more tactical level. They don’t deal with the strategic considerations; that is the job of product managers. Product owners are involved in project origination and implementation; they also monitor progress.
The role of product owner originates from the Scrum framework for product development. In Scrum, the product owner oversees the backlog of tasks which are to be finished by developers. The backlog is a list of tasks that need to be finished in order to release a new feature.
The product manager prepares plans and tasks, then the product owner helps the development team to accomplish them. The product owner has some leeway in how best to organise the hands-on development effort. They coordinate meetings as well as demos and testing.
What is the difference?
Product manager is a job function, whereas product owner tends to be a role given to one member of a development team. Essential tasks of a project owner include constant communication and support for others so that it is easier for them to fulfil their tasks, according to an article on the business2community.com website.
Why is there a need for both roles?
If there is no full-time project owner, there may be a lack of communication. The reason for this is that the product manager has numerous external responsibilities and therefore only limited time for communication with developers and assistance in problem-solving .
If a project manager is too heavily involved in internal development responsibilities, customers and market conditions will probably be neglected.
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