The PM Role and Product Lifecycle

Deciding what to build and why: discovering valuable, usable, feasible, and viable solutions and aligning the team to deliver outcomes for customers and the business.

Value (will customers buy/use it), usability (can they figure it out), feasibility (can we build it), and business viability (does it work for the business).

Value and business viability; designers own usability and engineers own feasibility, though the team tackles all together.

A PM decides what to build and why, focusing on outcomes; a project manager plans and coordinates how and when work gets done within scope, time and budget.

A program manager coordinates multiple related projects and cross-team dependencies toward a larger goal; a PM owns a product's direction and outcomes.

The 2020 Scrum Guide defines Product Owner as an accountability (not a job title) for maximizing product value and managing the Product Backlog. Cagan argues the PM should hold it, but a PM who only administers the backlog, without discovery or strategy, is not doing the full PM job.