I received from @akitaonrails an interesting article concerning the differences and responsibilities of the product owner and product manager roles.

For the author, the PO must perform:

  1. Articulate the product vision to the team
  2. Define the goals at the beginning of every sprint
  3. Tell the story behind each user story so that the development team understands what is required. So the PO must understand the end user requirements.
  4. Define or help define the user story acceptance criteria so the team knows when they are DONE
  5. Be able to prioritize the stories and be able to negotiate/collaborate on priorities with the team. Negotiate priorities occurs when after taking the top priorities off the backlog; there may be some remaining capacity that the next highest priority story won’t fit in to. So in those cases, a lower priority feature could be picked.
  6. Must be available at all inspect and adapt points to answer questions and help guide the team empirically

On the other side, the PM must perform:

  1. Defining the marketing strategies and outbound marketing communications
  2. Pricing strategies
  3. Understanding the positioning of the product in the market place
  4. Competitive analysis

For me, the PO mainly responsibilities are the ones that highlighted. What do you think about them?