Thank you! That is the first coherent explanation I've seen. Reviewing these in the light of agile software development in the form of scrum and kanban:
I'm struck by how close your definition of Product Manager is to the idea of Product Owner: a person who understands the interests of the users and the business and prioritises work in order of bang for buck. Someone who is really good with the 80/20 rule.
It also explains to me why no-one can explain the transition from PO to PM: the people who think there is any difference did not really understand the PO role.
Dividing work up, organising an issue tracker etc. are tangential activities that POs frequently perform, but they can also be performed by anyone else on the team.
I'd argue that when you reduce the "owner" to the person whose only job is these tangential things, you actually hurt the team by taking initiative away from engineers. Engineers should be capable of organising their own work as a team, and should be considered junior if they can't.
I first encountered the ideas of programme manager and project manager in the pre-agile world (from orgs that liked PRINCE/2). It makes sense to me that the programme manager role exists now in a larger team of teams of teams environment. The agile manifesto was about small teams and didn't really have anything to say about larger projects.
A hat tip to scrum masters who seem to have been sidelined in the product management world, because their (no-less important, when done well) role was to unblock in exactly the way that you describe a programme manager doing (plus understanding people and improving collaboration). The main difference I can see here is that a scrum master was usually responsible for one team only, which was probably too little authority to compete with the ambition of product people and the disinterest of business executives. Hence no surprise that the role has disappeared.
The "project manager" role isn't something I've encountered recently, but seems like what it always was (what you get when developers aren't/cannot be trusted to take initiative). It sounds like a more honest title than watered-down "product owner": these orgs never understood agile or product and just gave their project managers a new title.
I'm struck by how close your definition of Product Manager is to the idea of Product Owner: a person who understands the interests of the users and the business and prioritises work in order of bang for buck. Someone who is really good with the 80/20 rule.
It also explains to me why no-one can explain the transition from PO to PM: the people who think there is any difference did not really understand the PO role.
Dividing work up, organising an issue tracker etc. are tangential activities that POs frequently perform, but they can also be performed by anyone else on the team.
I'd argue that when you reduce the "owner" to the person whose only job is these tangential things, you actually hurt the team by taking initiative away from engineers. Engineers should be capable of organising their own work as a team, and should be considered junior if they can't.
I first encountered the ideas of programme manager and project manager in the pre-agile world (from orgs that liked PRINCE/2). It makes sense to me that the programme manager role exists now in a larger team of teams of teams environment. The agile manifesto was about small teams and didn't really have anything to say about larger projects.
A hat tip to scrum masters who seem to have been sidelined in the product management world, because their (no-less important, when done well) role was to unblock in exactly the way that you describe a programme manager doing (plus understanding people and improving collaboration). The main difference I can see here is that a scrum master was usually responsible for one team only, which was probably too little authority to compete with the ambition of product people and the disinterest of business executives. Hence no surprise that the role has disappeared.
The "project manager" role isn't something I've encountered recently, but seems like what it always was (what you get when developers aren't/cannot be trusted to take initiative). It sounds like a more honest title than watered-down "product owner": these orgs never understood agile or product and just gave their project managers a new title.