Release Manager vs Delivery Manager. What's different about the roles?

Question

So I have this confusion about the roles of Release Manager and Delivery Manager. I thought they were the same thing but apparently I'm incorrect in believing that.

From what I could piece together, both roles are about releasing stuff and taking care of operational aspects of that release (like bugs coming back in, performance issues that need to be fixed, etc).

Delivery Manager seems to be another name for Project Manager, while Release Manager seems to be another name for Scrum Master. I understand the first statement somehow, but the second statement doesn't seem to make sense since, from what I know about Scrum, the Scrum Master isn't concerned with releases but with the Scrum enactment.

If someone can shed some light into the situation, my questions would be:

1. Are a Release Manager and a Delivery Manager the same thing or not? What are the differences and similarities?

2. Is a Release Manager a function in classic project management and a Release Manager a function in Agile?

3. I understand that roles don't mean much as each company override them or redefine them to mean various stuff, but is there a core definition for these roles? What do Release Managers and Delivery Managers do?

Answer 1

They're pretty much whatever the company defines them as.

To the best of my knowledge, 'Release Manager' and 'Delivery Manager' don't come from any published frameworks, the way 'Scrum Master' comes from the Scrum Guide.

So, the answer to all three of your questions is 'it depends how your company defines them'. There may be common interpretations, but there's no canonical definition to override.

Answer 2

When I see job-titles like these being used, they have very little to do with scrum, and my personal opinion is that they are mostly identical. The only difference seems to me to be whether the product in question is internal or a true externally-facing "product."

Every software product goes through a fairly constant cycle of "development advances," which IMHO is the main purview of "scrum." Then, periodically, a final version of it is gathered-up and "deployed," which in some cases (but, not all ...) is a very formalized process.