#13 Product Managers do not own Product Vision
On Product Leader vs Product Manager
Product Managers / Owners don’t own the Product Vision
Product Leaders do.
I find that those who believe otherwise, come from a pure Scrum background. The only “truth” they know.
But it’s time to descend from your Scrum La La Land into the reality of building great Product organizations (I'm going to get hate for this 😂)
As Marty Cagan puts it:
“The product vision is the explicit responsibility of the head of product” (aka. product leader).
“This is not something that is delegated to individual contributor PMs or product teams, although they can of course contribute and review.”
I agree.
But then, many Scrum advocates step in and say:
Hold on... “The Product Owner creates, manages, and owns the Product Vision.”
… even though there’s nothing in the Scrum Guide mentioning this.
Now, that to me is a clear demonstration of how inflexible many Scrum advocates are.
They forget that Scrum doesn't work at scale, as it’s defined at a single-team level.
Despite this being well documented, they're still preaching that “POs” own the Product Vision - at all costs.
Which is nonsense, in most cases.
Here’s why:
1️⃣ The Product Vision should not be centered on a single team or value stream (e.g. product).
This harms the whole point of having a north star, potentially across different products - that will guide the interconnected strategic efforts of various teams;
2️⃣ For you to create this vision, you need to continuously “see” the different dots - so that you can connect them.
You need to deeply understand the business needs and your company’s ambitions. This requires you to collaborate intensely with different teams, the C-Suite, and the Board - which will require a particular set of skills and seniority.
3️⃣ Which many PMs / POs may lack (not all)
4️⃣ But also because deciding WHICH problems to solve next requires time.
5️⃣ Which many PMs/POs don’t have, since they're busy finding out HOW to solve the existing problems that they were assigned to solve. In other words, discover and deliver value through their products/value stream.
The Product leader role (e.g. CPO, VP of Product, Head of Product...) is specifically designed to spend time creating, iterating, and communicating the Strategic Context.
This is a different role than a PM in an empowered product team.
And radically different than the PO role as part of the typical Scrum team...
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Note 1: In startups and scaleups, Product Vision is usually owned by one of the co-founders.
Note 2: Great Product leaders are usually amazing at collaborating and facilitating. So, "owning" doesn't mean defining it in a closed room. Far from it.
I discussed this at Product Masterclass in Dec 2023 - check it out for more details!
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Hey there 👋 I’m Afonso, Founder & Partner at Scandinavian Product Group. Thanks for reading :)