The product owner is a very important component in a Scrum team, as it is the force driving the team towards the satisfaction of the end-user needs. This is a different situation if you are in a small startup or responsible for a large, established product line. In this blog post, Roman Pichler discusses the differences between small and big product owners.
The blog post discusses first the amount of responsibility of the product owner. The big product owner, sometimes called product manager, deals more with the visionary aspects of products. The small product owner works at the tactical level, discussing for instance how to define the screen of an application. The post presents the the benefits and the drawback of the two product owner variants. In fact, Roman Pichler thinks that a product could need a different type of product owner depending on the maturity of the product.
His conclusion is that “a product owner is a big product owner by default in my view – just like a product manager should manage the product in its entirety. Small product owners and technical product managers are specialised roles. Use them wisely.”
Read the complete blog post on http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/big-product-owner-small-product-owner/