Main idea

Defending the Product Owner through its framework definition — understand the need, define features from the customer's point of view, carry a vision, arbitrate conflicting priorities, maximize value — in fact describes the Product Manager job. On that definition the disagreement no longer exists: all that remains is a quarrel over a word.

Job ads describe something else: feed the backlog, write the user stories, sit between the business and the developers, run the ceremonies. That is the profile that is mostly hired, assessed and promoted, and so it is the one that makes up the role's real population.

When the reference definition and the job description diverge, it is the second that manufactures the job as it exists. Discussing a role through its framework definition is a way of never discussing what is practised.

Why it matters

This gives anyone an accessible verification method: read a dozen job ads rather than a framework. What an organization buys describes its intentions better than what it declares.

And it defuses a common move in discussion, where a critique of reality is met with an ideal definition nobody applies.

Nuances and limits

A job description is written by HR from a template, often copied from a competitor's ad: it describes the market more faithfully than any particular team, and a team can give the role entirely different content once the person has arrived.

And the gap sometimes runs the other way: some ads promise a strategic scope the real role doesn't include.

Open questions

• What signal, in an ad, distinguishes a real arbitration mandate from copied strategic vocabulary?