Time To Assign Owners To Your Applications

One of the chief obstacles to bridging the business/IT gap is the fact that no one really owns the bridge. While some traditional roles, such as business analyst and project manager, combine business and technology elements, they work on the business or IT side. Fortunately, a role that straddles business goals and technological means already exists: product manager. The people acting in this role may not have business cards containing the title "product manager," but product management is their essential job. The increased urgency of building a stronger partnership between business and IT is driving both productization and, by extension, a growing need for product managers. Other forces — the proliferation of mobile applications and the ubiquity of product-like applications appearing on customer-facing websites — are adding to the demand for real product management.