Project Manager, Sponsor, Product Owner and Team: Who Does What?
Role confusion on projects is rarely about job titles. Everybody knows who the sponsor is. The confusion is about decisions, and it surfaces when a decision belonging to one person gets taken, helpfully and in good faith, by another.
The cleanest way to separate the four roles is by the decision each one owns. Work can be shared, and on a small project three people will wear five hats between them, but a decision has an owner or it has a queue.
Four roles, four decisions
The sponsor owns whether. Whether the project starts, whether it continues, whether the investment is still justified at the next review, whether an exception outside the agreed tolerances is accepted. The sponsor is the only person who can stop the project, and that is the test of the role: somebody who cannot stop it is not the sponsor, whatever the governance document says.
The product owner, or the customer where no such role exists, owns what. Which of the possible things gets built, in what order, and whether what has been built is acceptable. That decision is taken continuously on adaptive work and at defined points on predictive work, and in both cases it belongs to whoever represents the need.
The project manager owns how and when. How the work is organised, sequenced, resourced and coordinated, what gets escalated and at what point, and how the project accounts for itself. A project manager does not own what gets built and does not own whether the project continues, and both of those are worth saying aloud in a room where everybody is nodding.
The team owns the doing, and on most modern projects rather more than that. How the work is performed at a technical level, what the estimate is, what a piece of work has to satisfy before anybody calls it complete. A team told how to do the work as well as what to do has acquired a supervisor.
Three places the boundary fails
Section 2.5 of The Standard for Project Management describes these roles and is careful to treat them as functions that have to be performed rather than posts that have to exist, which is the honest position on a project of four people. The failures happen at the boundaries, and three of them recur.
A sponsor doing the product owner's job is the most common and the hardest to raise. An engaged sponsor with views about the product is an asset until the views arrive as priorities at a fortnightly board, at which point the team has no stable order of work and the person nominated to own the what has been quietly overruled. The sponsor is doing nothing wrong by holding an opinion. The mistake is in where the opinion lands.
A project manager doing the product owner's job is the most frequent failure nobody discusses. It happens because the role was never filled, or was filled by somebody with no time, and the work cannot move without somebody deciding what comes next. A project manager in that position is taking decisions they have no standing to take, and will be held to them later by people who were not available to take them at the time.
A product owner without authority is the third, and it produces the other two. Somebody is nominated, attends, and has to go away and ask before anything is settled. The decision does not disappear. It migrates to whoever will actually make it, which is usually the sponsor at a board or the project manager on a Wednesday afternoon.
A fortnightly board and a backlog that never settled
A government department was running a programme to replace a citizen-facing service. The senior responsible owner chaired a fortnightly programme board and was by every measure an engaged sponsor: he read everything, attended without fail, and had thought carefully about what the service should do.
A service owner had been nominated as the product decision-maker. She had a substantial day job running the existing service and could give the programme about half a day a week, which everybody had agreed was enough and was not.
What followed over four months was predictable with hindsight. The board discussed features, because the person in the room with the strongest view about the product was the sponsor and nobody else present held a mandate to disagree. Priorities emerged from the board. The delivery manager rebuilt the order of work after each one, the team's last fortnight was regularly invalidated, and the service owner engaged less and less, because her decisions did not survive contact with the board.
The repair was governance and it took one meeting. The board's terms of reference were rewritten to cover whether the programme continued, whether the investment remained justified and whether exceptions were accepted, with an explicit line that feature priority was not a board matter. The service owner was given two days a week, backfilled, and authority to decide anything inside the board's funding envelope. The sponsor kept his views and took them to the service owner, which is where they had always belonged and where they proved considerably more useful.
For a PMP® candidate, the question is who owns the decision a situation turns on. A team receiving changing priorities is raising the what decision and where it is being taken. A project manager asked to approve something with financial consequences is raising the whether decision and whether it has been delegated. Name the decision before naming the person, because the person follows from it. Situations where the wrong role is making the call are the material a structured PMP exam preparation course uses for this.
The test takes ten minutes. Write the four decisions on a page and put against each the name of the person who makes it without asking anybody. Then check that person knows. On a surprising number of projects at least one of those four names is the project manager's, and nobody ever delegated it.
Interested in going further?
An engaged sponsor with views about the product is an asset in the right conversation and a bottleneck in the wrong one. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the decision is sound and the person taking it is not.
The project management roles, and the functions behind them, are set out in The Standard inside the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A028: Project Manager vs Scrum Master vs Product Owner
A029: What Sponsors Should Do, and What They Shouldn’t
A021: Project Management Meets Product Management
A030: The Project Team Is Not the Project Manager’s Staff
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
