Hi Supro, You can find my thoughts on business analysts working as Scrum product owners in the article Business Analysts in Scrum. Hope this helps.

Hi Madison, As I explain in the article, there is no product manager in Scrum. You can think of the Scrum product owner as the agile product manager.

Additionally, it is worth noting that SAFe is not Scrum. It’s a scaling framework that borrows concepts and terms from Scrum. In the case of the product owner, SAFe redefines the role, see my article Six Types of “Product” Owners. Hope this helps.

Thanks for sharing your perspective Michael. I agree that strengthening product management skills helps agile initiatives succeed. I also find that many organisations are not clear on the role of product and lack an empowered product management function. On the positive side, the product management community has grown, there are more opportunities for product people to educate themselves, there is more guidance available and more tools than 10 or 15 years ago. Onwards and upwards 😉

I think far more Agile projects fail because of the lack of product management skills rather than issues with building / engineering.

We are getting better constantly at building things right but still fail often at building the right things.

Thanks for sharing your feedback and experience Jovana.

I became interested in this topic while doing research for my recent project. Most articles out there insist that these two roles are completely different, that there must be two people in these roles. But in my experience, it depends on the company. In our startup, we have pretty limited resources and it’s one person performing both these roles. So I prefer your term ‘product people’ and use it often myself. 🙂

Hi Mal,

Thanks for sharing your question. It seems to me that you are facing two challenges: help your product managers embrace an agile way of working and collaborate with remote development teams.

The first challenge require the willingness of the individuals to adopt a new mindset together with new techniques, tool, and processes, as well as learning and development measures to help the product managers successfully embrace an agile way of working and become effective product owners (or if appropriate, feature and component owners).

In order to address the second challenge, I recommend reviewing the current collaboration between the UK-based product managers and the dev team in Asia together with its strengths and weaknesses. While an agile process like Scrum is likely to require more interaction between the dev team and the product people, if your current setup is working well and if you don’t plan to make any major changes to your product(s), you may be able to continue with the setup.

Watch out, though, that you don’t use a proxy product owner at the remote site, someone who acts as the local product owner for the dev team but is not empowered to make the product decisions, see my article “Avoiding Common Product Owner Mistakes” for more information. I find that remote product owners often have to regularly travel to their teams in addition to having frequent video calls. What’s more, some agile techniques like user stories are difficult to use in a distributed environment.

As a rule of thumb, the more stable your product is, the fewer changes it experiences, and the more the dev teams knows about the users and product, the easier it is to have a remote product owner.

Does this help?