6/27/2023 0 Comments Push to talk![]() The Product Manager talks to all the users and tells us what the requirements are. “You are teaching us to talk to users, but I am a Product Owner. I was doing a workshop for a very large bank when one of the attendees chimed in. That was until I had my first experience teaching Product Management at a company using the SAFe framework. We had been using Scrum for years, but I was still called a Product Manager, so the fact that they would be interchangeable made sense to me. They told me it was the same as a Product Manager, but it was a term used in Scrum. The first time I heard the term, I asked someone what it meant. I had not heard of the term Product Owner until years later. “Product Manager” seemed to have gravitas to it, and when I looked at other tech companies in the Valley, I could see a clear career path carved out for me whereas Business Analysts were different at every company. It was all the same work I had been doing before, but now it had a different name. I wasn’t called a Product Manager until I bailed out of that and landed in a startup. I went on being called a Business Analyst as I worked at banks and other financial services companies. I was tasked with gathering the requirements from sales, coming up with a solution, designing it, and then shipping the specification document to development to be built. Honestly, I did very little of what I teach as Product Management now either. I did very little “business analysis” as we would look at it in traditional IT companies. When I started my career, I was called a Business Analyst. Let’s look at where these terms and disciplines originated from and how some common frameworks explain them. It’s an interesting question and one that takes time to unpack.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |