One Product Ladder (Kill the PO/PM Split)
Collapse product owner and product manager into a single APM → PM → Senior PM ladder
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
SAFe institutionalizes a split where product owners sit with developers and product managers do discovery — often in different reporting lines and different career paths, so a product owner can never learn strategy. Perri's fix is structural: there is no such thing as a product owner outside scrum, so make everyone a product manager on one ladder (Associate PM → PM → Senior PM), with seniority reflecting discovery and measurement skill rather than the title reflecting a process role.
Origin
Melissa Perri, arguing against the role split codified in the Scrum Guide (Schwaber/Sutherland) and hardened by SAFe (Dean Leffingwell). She notes the first Scrum Guide explicitly allowed the product owner to be the product manager; the 2013 version most transformations run on dropped that line.
Core principles
- 01Take scrum away and you still need product management — the product owner role does not exist without scrum.
- 02Two titles for one job confuses everyone and blocks the strategy path.
- 03Seniority should reflect skill (discovery, measurement, direction-setting), not proximity to developers.
- 04An IC track is fine — an IC product owner vs an IC product manager is not.
- 05The 'product owners don't scale' objection is weak: huge companies run without any.
How to run it
- 1
Reject the scaling objection
When leaders claim product owners are needed because PMs don't scale, note that massive companies operate with zero product owners. The real issue is that work isn't distributed evenly and strategic guidance isn't being pushed down.
Pro tip In Lenny's job-market data, no top tech company — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix — has product owners.
Watch out This does not mean an insurance company should copy Google wholesale; it means the role isn't a scaling requirement.
- 2
Define one ladder
Establish Associate PM → Product Manager → Senior PM (with an IC track above). A senior PM can absolutely work on a scrum or development team — seniority is not about distance from developers.
Pro tip Associate PM is the honest landing spot for someone who knows scrum basics but not discovery.
Watch out Do not create 47 titles. Perri has seen orgs with platform product managers, platform product owners, API product owners and product associates all coexisting.
- 3
Set the bar for the PM title
To be a product manager (not an associate), a person must be able to talk to customers, digest what they say, turn it into feature direction and a backlog, and know how to measure the result. If they can't, they're an APM.
- 4
Rename first, assess second — and don't assume
Change everyone's title to product manager, then evaluate actual skill. Plenty of people carry the product owner title only because the company assigned it and are already doing the full job.
Pro tip Never use the title as a proxy for competence in either direction.
Watch out Renaming without assessment and training produces product managers in name only.
- 5
Extend the ladder upward
Make sure the path continues: from one team, to multiple teams, to owning a product line, to director/VP/CPO. SAFe defines none of these roles, which is why enterprise product VPs often don't know what their job is.
Pro tip Enterprises increasingly need a Chief Product Officer in the C-suite asking how software makes the company ten times better than its competition.
Watch out Fear of overhauling traditional ways of working — and of middle managers whose jobs are most at risk — is what stops career ladders getting written. The C-suite has to force the direction.
In the wild
A Fortune 10 C-suite Perri had worked with for years finally decided to codify the product manager role with defined responsibilities up and down the organization. The trigger was churn: they were losing good people who joined the big-name company, arrived, and asked where their career path was.
→ They committed to a single defined product role across the org — Perri's 'music to my ears' moment, and evidence that retention data, not philosophy, moves executives.
In SAFe orgs, product owners report into product managers — sometimes in an entirely different business line and career path. Product owners are told strategy, market research and customer conversations are the product manager's job, so they never get exposure to any of it.
→ Product owners become extremely tactical order takers with no route to the strategic role above them, which is exactly the churn driver enterprises later have to fix.
Common mistakes
Keeping two titles for one job
The PO/PM split confuses everyone, and where the two sit in separate reporting lines it makes the product owner role a permanent dead end — the person can never get the strategy experience the promotion requires.
Building the ladder only up to the team
SAFe has no role definition above product manager, so directors and VPs of product in these organizations genuinely do not know what they should be doing. A ladder that stops at the team leaves the top of the org improvising.
Is it for you?
Best for
Enterprise product leaders and HR partners designing product career paths in a scrum/SAFe organization
Not ideal for
Organizations where the product owner title is legally or contractually fixed and cannot be changed — start with the bar and the ladder instead
From the transcript
“take scrum away you still need product management right like product owner doesn't exist without scrum”
“get rid of these two different titles because it's confusing everybody”
“you are basically making these product owners order takers they are extremely tactical”
“I've seen companies with 47 different titles for product managers”
From the episode
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SAFe and the product owner role
Melissa Perri (author, founder of Product Institute)