Demystifying Roles within an IT Organization

Consultant Feature Article

Vaco’s VP of Delivery at Vaco, Brian Henn, interviewed Senior Project Manager and Premier Consultant Jen Kidd, who’s worked on several different projects with organizations across the Greater Cincinnati Area.

Define a Product Owner.

Jen: Product Owners primarily work with development teams or scrum teams or an individual team of 5-8 developers including QA. Their job is to write the stories and decompose the features so the development team can do the work to prepare for a release. They are responsible for backlog grooming, sprint planning, and other types of activities. Product Owners are focused on the individual, releasable components, which are normally completed and released after two-week sprints or several sprints.

How does a Product Owner work with business stakeholders specifically on delivering business value and ROI?

Jen: This depends on how large the organization is. In larger organizations they may work with a Product Manager to communicate with stakeholders. In smaller organizations the Product Owner will work directly with key stakeholders. It’s important for someone in this role to understand what the business wants and its capabilities to successfully complete its goals and objectives. Once the development team has done some work, they present it back to the stakeholders and get the go-ahead to release. This helps determine how much more development is needed.

If you’re in an environment that isn’t using Agile or is just beginning Agile and has project managers, how does that differ?

Jen: In a traditional environment, they’d have a Business Analyst who gathers requirements with stakeholders and works hand-on-hand with a Project Manager. The Project Manager will be overseeing one or multiple workstreams in a Waterfall environment.

Define a Program Manager.

Jen: Program Managers are generally over an entire program which may be composed of several different projects. They focus on the release plan, strategy, efficiency of delivery, overall budget, and resource planning. They are also responsible for coordinating with leaders to determine when different projects within that program need to be released. Program Managers measure the importance of the program. Different from a project, programs typically don’t have a finite beginning or end and last longer.

Tell us about Project Management Offices.

Jen: Oftentimes IT teams work in Agile, and Business teams operate more traditionally. In this instance you may a have technical Product Owner or Product Manager working with the business Project Manager to coordinate needs for a project/program delivery. The Project Manager will request development work for their project and will let the Product Owner/Manager know when delivery is desired. The Product Owner will then coordinate with development teams to confirm what can be delivered within the desired timeline and relay status and necessary trade-offs to the Project Manager to get business direction. It is common that they will work “hand-in-hand”. The Business PMO will focus on operations, budget, timeline, and capital. And the IT team will focus on deliverying the desired functionality, capability & integration with other systems.

Tell us about your experience as a Product Manager.

Jen: I worked as a Product Manager to identify the product’s vision and what needed to be delivered and when. I wrote features and composed full product roadmaps, including what capabilities we wanted to deliver that would add value to our customers overtime. I stayed away from how it was to be solved technically and really focused more on the business capabilities - the “why”. The Product Owner would take my work to the development team and decide which technologies could be used with the most effective technical approach or solution design.