Product Owner and Product Management Roles and Responsibilities
Two roles, one backlog chain
Product Management is accountable for a product's desirability, feasibility, viability, and sustainability across its lifecycle: vision, strategy, roadmap, customer and market understanding, and the ART backlog of Features. It defines each Feature's benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria, ranks Features with WSJF, and partners with the System Architect on enablers.
The Product Owner is a member of the Agile Team, not a manager. The PO owns the Team Backlog - writing and sequencing Stories, setting acceptance criteria, agreeing the Definition of Done, supporting the team during the iteration, and accepting stories when done. POs also verify that team output satisfies Feature acceptance criteria and carry the team's reality back to Product Management.
Rule of thumb
Product Management answers “what and why, for whom”; the Product Owner answers “what next, and how well.” Features live at the ART level and are split by teams into Stories. If an answer choice has the PO owning the roadmap, or the PM writing every story, it is wrong.
Worked example
Customers want single sign-on. PM writes the Feature with a benefit hypothesis (“cuts access-related support tickets ~30%”), acceptance criteria, and a WSJF score, and brings it to PI Planning. The PO splits it into stories (“login redirects to IdP,” “session refresh,” “legacy-user fallback”), writes acceptance criteria for each, sequences them across two iterations, and at the System Demo confirms the Feature meets PM's criteria.
Common traps
Treating the PO as a project manager or team lead; assuming the PO is a junior PM; confusing Feature versus Story granularity; forgetting that the PO owns content (what) while the team owns the how.