Technical Product Manager and Product Owner. What’s the difference?

Interestingly, the role of Technical Product Manager evolved from the regular Project Manager role. And it happened so with the rise of technical capabilities, growing complexity, and rapid growth of highly technical products. And, so you’ve proved the business idea and your MVP got the initial traction. That is when growth and complexity start accelerating. Your team is expanding and the development moves to the next level. It now might include: 

• several developers on the backend, 
• a few specialists on the front end,
• a team of developers for mobile apps, 
• a QA team, and
•  one or two DevOps specialists. 

With the growth of development, you are likely to have more stakeholders. So, some managerial roles need to also expand. Who is it going to be: a Technical Product Manager, a Product Owner, or both?

In this article, we’ll explore their unique skill sets, responsibilities, and potential clashes in their goals. We’ll also look at specific business cases and how each role can contribute to better business outcomes.

Technical Product Manager VS Product Owner: How technical is each role?

A Technical Product Manager (TPM) must have a deep technical background. The word ‘technical’ in the job title here directly translates into managing technical challenges at an expert level. TPM needs to be well-versed in:

• system architecture, 
• analyzing technical feasibility, 
• understanding trade-offs of development decisions,
• managing infrastructure and directing CI/CD efforts,
• security and compliance. 

So, the Technical Product Manager is a deep-tech role first and foremost. 

In contrast, a Product Owner (PO) should have just enough technical knowledge to translate business requirements into functional requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria. In addition, the PO requires some technical knowledge to manage the Product Backlog as it relates to the technical debt. This is essential as allowing the debt to accumulate can hinder any future ability to innovate or add functionality, and quite a few other unpleasant consequences. However, the Product Owner can delegate the task of assessing the technical debt. So again, this role requires more of a general understanding of the technical side.

Practical Example: Adding a feature to the productivity app

Let’s imagine a project like a productivity app that requires integration with Google Calendar. When it comes to the Technical Product Manager, they must know:

• Rate limits of Google Calendar API, data formats, and endpoints to use;
• OAuth 2.0 flow with exchanging tokens, their storage on front-end and back-end, and potential vulnerabilities like XSS and CSRF;
• Other issues with performance, scalability, data-related concerns, etc.

In contrast, the Product Owner should:

• Document a new user story like ‘As a user, I want to synchronize my in-app productivity efforts with activities in Google Calendar, so I can manage my time efficiently’;
• Then, develop acceptance criteria for this feature such as the user can add/remove links to Google Calendar, calendar events displayed correctly in-app, etc.
• Assign this feature its priority in the Product Backlog evaluating how it maximizes the overall product value etc. 

Technical Product Manager VS Product Owner: Communication Loops

Below, you can see communication loops for both roles and their main point of overlap- the development team. This further highlights how different these two roles are.

Overall, the Technical Product Manager mainly handles communication across technical teams. The technical loop extends to database teams, a security team, etc., or their respective leads. In addition, this person is present at the top-level managerial discussions. The TPM is responsible for discussing the technical impact, resource demands, and product timelines with the founder or executives. 

Meanwhile, the Product Owner communicates closely with sales and marketing teams, customers or customer success teams, and the UX team. This role is highly focused on the user’s needs, preferences, and experiences. The key focus is maximizing the value proposition based on user feedback and behavior.

Point of Potential Clash between the Technical Product Manager and the Product Owner

Potential clash stems from differing priorities in the respective roles. It is quite common that the Technical Product Manager gives more priority to maintenance, refactoring, and performance improvements of the existing codebase. The Product Owner will often prioritize the development of new features as well as the speed of delivery. So, in situations when the TPM focuses on long-term sustainability, the PO might opt for short-term fixes. 

Recently, we’ve published an article “Technical debt. Why should a product owner care about it?” In a nutshell, technical debt is something that accumulates over time and the longer it gets delayed, the more ‘expensive’ dealing with it will become. And chances are that after a dynamic MVP stage with quick iterations and new functionality releases, your startup has accumulated some. Therefore,  every new sprint/product iteration needs to have items from the Product Backlog that specifically address the technical debt. Technical debt is a top priority for the Technical Product Manager. 

In contrast, the Product Owner might see the technical debt as an obstacle or a secondary task. This role is more about how end users experience the product. The Product Owner searches for ways to engage users with improvements to UI/UX and expand the product’s functionality. The priority is to consistently contribute to an immediate value proposition. 

As such, addressing technical debt is the key point where two roles might often disagree. One will be in favor of refactoring and optimizations. While the other will be pushing for additions and enhancements. However, both roles strive to do so for the benefit of the end-user and business. They just come in at that from different angles. One aims at building a robust, scalable, and performant foundation, while the Product Owner focuses on user experience and the market.

How can a growing startup decide whether to add the Technical Product Manager and the Product Owner to the company?

After launching an MVP, your business grows in size, and adding people is necessary. The demands on the technical infrastructure are increasing. For this, you can hire a Technical Product Manager. In parallel, the sales & marketing team gets more feedback and ideas to work with, so new enhancements, improvements, and new offerings are on the way. The latter is the area of the Product Owner. 

Traditionally, the Product Owner appears earlier in the company than the Technical Product Manager. In addition, often the PO can wear many hats on a smaller scale. For instance, there is the role of a Technical PO. You can read about that in our article “Top 5 Duties of Technical Product Owner in Custom MVP App”. 

In terms of statistics, the demand for the Product Owner is twice as high (2,000+ job ads per 14 days) as compared to the Technical Product Manager (1,000+ job ads per 14 days). 

The average US salaries for the roles are as follows:

• The Product Owner ranges between $110,000 – $140,000 a year
• The Technical Product Manager is in the range from $113,000 to $219,000 a year.

However, you can find more affordable rates in outsourcing. With outsourcing in Eastern Europe, such as Ukraine or Poland, you can hire these roles for half the cost. So, if you are in need of a Technical Product Manager, or Product Owner and you Develop Custom iOS app or Develop Custom Android app, or both, consider outsourcing.

Let’s now dive into business cases in which a particular role can ensure your startup’s success.

Feature Time-to-Market At Scale: The Technical Product Manager

Introducing workarounds or navigating through a messy codebase always slows down the development process. This often occurs if the development has been quick and not focused on maintaining flexibility, modularity, and extensibility. Functionality gets intertwined and interdependent. Injecting any new code becomes a hurdle. This is where the Technical Product Manager comes in. This person can introduce missing standards, do technical feasibility analysis, and optimize the existing codebase and infrastructure.

Customer Satisfaction: The Product Owner

The development team releases features and updates on time, but the customer metrics do not grow. It indicates a misalignment between the functionality and value. In this case, the Product  Owner is to the rescue. This person will ensure that functionality lives up to users’ expectations and beyond. 

Development Efficiency

This is the issue of technical debt. Here, depending on the size of the team, you either need a Product Owner with great technical debt management experience. Or, if you have several development teams, you need to bring in the Technical Product Manager. Here, the choice depends on how advanced your technical infrastructure really is. If you just moved from 1-2 developers to 4-5, the Product Owner will do. If the engineer count is above 10, go for the Technical Product Manager. 

Scope Creep

It means that features pushed to the Product Backlog outweigh the development capacity by a lot. So, there is either no one to prioritize effectively or evaluate what is technically feasible. Bringing in the Product Owner can fix the Product Backlog if the problem lies in lack of prioritization. The common pitfall is that ‘when everything seems important, nothing is’. If all possible features make it to the Backlog with similar priorities, that is a problem of evaluating the feature value and impact. The Product Owner will be able to connect the features to the customer value and prioritize the Product Backlog accordingly. 

On the other hand, sometimes Product Backlog is overloaded due to a lack of technical feasibility analysis. Imagine a situation where a PO pushes for a custom reporting dashboard. The grounds are solid because quite a few clients requested this feature. In addition, it presents opportunities for upselling. However, once the feature enters the Backlog, and undergoes a technical review, there are quite a few issues. The estimated development time will be 4 sprints instead of 1 as initially estimated by the Product Owner. More so, it will require the work of backend, data engineering, and DevOps teams. In this case, the Technical Product Manager can clean up the Backlog by clearly conveying the opportunity cost against development and infrastructure costs. Thus, the Technical Product Manager can align the development scope with the technical capabilities to ensure the best business outcome. 

Internal Miscommunication

Imagine rolling out a new premium subscription. The marketing team has already launched a high-profile campaign. However, the technical lead assumed the deadlines were flexible. And while marketing promoting launch in a week, the feature is still in the works and hasn’t reached the testing stage. In this case, the Technical Product Manager can take the lead and organize intradepartmental meeting. This role has the authority to resolve a reasonable launch date. In this case, the launch date will have to be pushed back slightly to give the feature time for testing and debugging. After all, not hitting the mark with the paying feature can lead to negative business outcomes.

In other cases, sometimes user stories written in haste by someone who is not really trained in it can cause a lot of extra work. If the feature’s user story is open to interpretation, there will be multiple code rewrites. The Product Owner is a role whose primary responsibility is to communicate business requirements clearly and unambiguously through user stories, functional requirements, and acceptance criteria. In this case, adding the Product Owner role to your startup will prove most efficient.

Business Outcomes

Here, the Technical Product Manager is needed when your profit margins are eaten up by tech costs. Optimizing the technical infrastructure to lower costs incurred from data transfer, development time, maintenance time, and such is this role’s specialty.

If your ROI – Return on Investment – is not up to par, the Product Owner should join the team. Often, the problem lies in investing in features that do not result in improved value and consequently higher returns. The Product Owner will help align the development owner with customers’ expectations. As a result, it will improve the value proposition and revenues against the investment.

To sum up

FAQ: Technical Product Manager vs. Product Owner