The term “Product Owner” appears frequently when discussing product management. My latest post on LinkedIn about the differences between Product Owner and Product Manager, which I thought was an old topic, generated a large number of reactions, comments, and reposts. This substantial reaction volume made me realize we should discuss these differences more deeply.

Originally conceived as a critical role to maximize the product’s value, the Product Owner was envisioned as a single, empowered individual who bridges the gap between business and development teams. Introduced formally in the early 2000s through the writings of Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, signatories of the Agile Manifesto, and later standardized in the Scrum Guide, the Product Owner’s responsibilities center around managing the backlog, prioritizing work and ensuring that the team delivers value to stakeholders.

However, as Agile has gained popularity across industries and teams have adopted Scrum in diverse ways, the term “Product Owner” has evolved—and not always in ways that align with its original intent. These misuses highlight why the term “Product Owner” may no longer serve its intended purpose and why moving away from its use could benefit broader product management practices. When the Product Owner role is reduced to administrative tasks or conflated with unrelated functions, it often leads to fragmented responsibilities, unclear ownership, and weakened team collaboration. This, in turn, hinders an organization’s ability to deliver cohesive product vision and strategies aligned with customer needs to drive meaningful business outcomes.

This series of articles examines three common misconceptions about the term ‘Product Owner’ in the broader context of the product management practice. I’ll explore their origins, challenges, and solutions to help teams rethink product roles, enabling better alignment with customer needs, effective use of technology, and stronger business outcomes.

Without further ado, let’s delve into the first misconception.

Misconception #1: Is Product Owner Just a Step in the Product Management Career Ladder?

I’m probably one of the people to blame for this misconception because of the image below:

BA, PO, and PM seen as a career

To illustrate how this misconception has evolved, I’d like to share my experience with the BA, PO, and PM roles across different organizations. Here’s the story behind this image.

Back in the mid-2000s, we implemented agile methodologies at Locaweb. We learned about Scrum and quickly adopted the term “Product Owner” to refer to the person connecting the product development team with customer needs and business results. Back then, we used the terms “Product Owner” and “Product Manager” interchangeably.

In 2016, I joined Conta Azul as its CPO. When I joined, one of the first things they told me during the onboarding was that they had recently visited some tech companies in Silicon Valley and realized that many had extinct the QA role. For this reason, they’ve decided to do the same and gave the existing QAs the new role of Business Analysts (BAs) responsible for specifying what each product team needed to do. After discussing with the senior product managers in my team, we built the image above, explaining the product management career.

When I joined Gympass in 2018, I saw widespread usage of the term “Associate Product Manager (APM)” as a reference to a more junior product management career. Marissa Mayer created This role at Google in the mid-2000s as part of a program designed to cultivate and train the next generation of product leaders. Unlike the BA/PO roles, which often focus on specifications and prioritization, the APM role emphasizes end-to-end product management and strategic thinking, making it a natural entry point into the product management career ladder. For this reason, I dropped the use of BA and PO in the product management career ladder and substituted them with the APM term as in the image below:

PM career ladder evolution

Conclusion

So there you have it: the 1st misconception, thinking that PO is a step in the PM career ladder, my mea-culpa, and how to avoid it.

In the following articles, I’ll talk about two other very common misconceptions of the usage of the term “Product Owner” in Product Management, why they happen, and how to avoid them:

• Misconception #2: Do product managers manage product owners?
• Misconception #3: Do product owners focus on execution while product managers focus on strategy?

Stay tuned!

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