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#1450 Splitting PROD for Product Management and Product Ownership change request pending

Hi, could you please strongly consider splitting PROD to 2 competencies. One focused on Product Management and the other Product Ownership. these are very distinct roles with distinct competencies and having the two competencies joined under one will ultimately result in a need to split them later on.

Product Management is outward focused looking at project success and ROI.

Product Ownership is inward focused looking at the delivery of a product or product increment.

Atlassian have defined this rather well - though I will admit it is still very confused in the market place (and opportunity for SFIA to lead the way).  

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/product-management/product-manager

Proposed change applies to Product management

Current status of this request: pending

What we decided

Keep under active review.
The industry does use the terms Product Manager, Product Owner inconsistently.
  • SFIA position is to reflect the industry and
  • SFIA define skills and skill levels not roles  
So currently...
  1. there is a Product management skill in SFIA 
  2. Organisations who have role/job called Product Manager - need to review what the role requires. It will need more than a single SFIA skill.
  3. Same for Product Owner
  4. Same for any other roles involved in product development, agile development - SFIA provides the building blocks to be configured into what jobs/roles require
  5. You find the other SFIA skills by looking at job responsibilities
  6. SFIA doesn't tell organisations how to split up Product Manager / Product Owner roles - that's in 
This is a great video (quite old) but you can tick off the relevant SFIA skills as he describes the key concepts - REQM is the main SFIA skill for the Product Owner
There is a discussion for those who have concerns about Project management versus Product management
I think the Product Owner is likely to apply PRMG skills
  • they are just (very) small, timeboxed projects (aligned with the sprint cycle)
  • small projects are a good thing for Product owners as it reduces the risk of deliverable the wrong stuff
One issue for SFIA is naming - calling the skill Project Management may put Product people off ("we don't do Project management we do Product management") - calling Project management something else or splitting it causes other (probably bigger) issues
 
Currently with PROD - we have a mix of stuff - not all of it would be done by either a pure Product Manager or a pure Product Owner role. 
  • It needs careful application and mixing and matching between PROD, PRMG, REQM, DEMM etc. 
  • I'm not sure there is a simple solution e.g. splitting PROD into 2 skills causes other issues. Not least that the titles Product Manager and Product Owner are not uniformly defined in the industry