Professional Scrum Product Owner

Learn To Maximize Value

Being a professional Product Owner encompasses more than writing requirements or managing a Product Backlog. Product Owners need to have a concrete understanding of all product management aspects, including but not limited to product ownership, that drive value from their products. 

Professional Scrum Product OwnerTM (PSPO) is a course that focuses on all of these areas to teach students how to maximize the value of products and systems. PSPO is a cutting-edge course for Product Owners, Agile product managers, and anyone responsible for a product’s success in the market. In this course, students will develop and solidify their knowledge of being a Product Owner through instruction and team-based exercises.

The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Professional Scrum Product Owner I certification exam (PSPO I).

What You Will Learn

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Students will develop and solidify their knowledge of Product Ownership through instruction and team-based exercises. From an Agile perspective, the breadth of the role’s responsibilities in delivering a successful product will become clearer. Metrics will be identified to track the creation of value and the successful delivery of the product to the marketplace.

The PSPO course is much more than just a set of slides and an instructor. In this course, students work on real-life cases with other classmates as a team. It is made up of discussions and hands-on exercises.

View the different Focus Areas covered within this class and others.

Course Objectives

Students are challenged to think in terms of Scrum and its principles to better understand what to do when they return to their workplaces and their specific challenges.

• Students will clearly understand Scrum's mechanics and how the Product Owner role fits in.
• Students can act as Product Owners for Scrum Teams and stakeholders.
• Students can effectively increase the business agility of their organization.

Course Description

PSPO is a cutting-edge course for Product Owners, Agile product managers, and anyone responsible for a software product’s success in the market. In this course, students will develop and solidify their knowledge of being a Product Owner through instruction and team-based exercises. The breadth of the role’s responsibilities in delivering a successful product will become clearer from an Agile perspective. Metrics are identified to track the creation of value and the successful delivery of the product to the marketplace.

The PSPO course is much more than just a set of slides and an instructor. In this course, students work on real-life cases with other classmates together as a team. This course comprises discussions and hands-on exercises based on real-life cases.

Who Should Attend?

The PSPO course may be interesting to all involved in software development using the Scrum framework, but it has been specifically conceived for those responsible for products from a business and product management perspective and taking on the highly accountable role of Scrum Product Owner.

Course Topics

• Agile Product Management
• Value-Driven Development
• Scrum Principles & Empiricism
• The Scrum Framework
• Product Backlog Management

Certification Assessments

All participants completing the PSPO course receive one password from taking the PSPO I assessment. PSPO class participants who attempt the PSPO I assessment within 14 days of receiving their free password and do not score at least 85% will be granted a 2nd attempt at no additional cost. As a student of the PSPO class, you are also entitled to a discount on the PSPO II assessment. 

Why Scrum.org

Scrum.org provides the highest-quality Scrum training, training materials, and certified Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) to teach it. Our training materials are created and maintained by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber, Scrum.org, and the community of PSTs who teach the courses, helping to ensure that they are in tune with what’s happening in software development organizations and always up-to-date with the latest practices.

Professional Scrum Trainers bring their own style and experience to the courses but use the same materials so that students learn from the same content regardless of who teaches the course or where it is taught worldwide.  Read more about the differences.

An Overview

Each Scrum.org course is assigned two stewards.  The steward is ultimately responsible for collecting input on the course materials, both existing and potential additions to be made, reviewing that input with the community and Ken Schwaber, and providing updates as required. 

Each course is stored in GitHub, allowing version control, feedback mechanisms, distribution, and much more, unlike the code Scrum Teams deliver for their products.  A PST can submit feedback on course materials, its delivery content, speaker notes, exercises, and much more through GitHub capabilities.  With over 290 PSTs around the world teaching the materials, that provides a fantastic number of people to provide excellent feedback to improve the content and quality of the courseware.   Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham explain the course.

PMI PDU Credits

Students of Scrum.org courses are able to claim Project Management Institute (PMI) PDU credit: 14 PDUs after attending a three-day Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) workshop.

Please note that PMI PDUs are earned for course attendance and not for passing a Scrum.org assessment. Students can claim PDUs under PMI's "Education courses provided by other third-party providers” category. You can claim your PDUs online at https://ccrs.pmi.org.

Are you ready?

The advice to prepare is to watch the following: 

• Product Owner, in a Nutshell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE
• a video on common misperceptions of a Product Owner - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr2rjaGmUzo
• Scrum Tapas videos at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=scrum+tapas+scrum.org, especially video recordings by Steve Porter
• and slowly & carefully read:
• the agile manifesto (values and principles pages, particularly the principles pages) - http://agilemanifesto.org/
• the scrum guide and read the history at https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

Bonus points if you already read Liberating Structures for large group facilitation - http://www.liberatingstructures.com/ls/. Extra bonus points if you install and play with the Liberating Structures app; it's free.

Arriving at a workshop without slowly and carefully reading the Scrum Guide shows disrespect to other attendees. Respect is one of the five Scrum Values.

Pricing

Pricing excludes UK VAT. UK VAT only applies to orders from the UK; it does not apply outside the UK. To request a manual invoice, email info@orderlydisruption.com with the subject "manual invoice." Payment would then be made via electronic transfer, a PayPal transaction, or an over-the-phone card payment. Without exception, all seats for a booking must be prepaid to confirm that booking. 

VAT is added for UK customers only.

NON-UK CUSTOMERS, PLEASE NOTE: VAT is removed once an address has been entered at checkout. 

Profile of the trainer

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John Coleman is an active practitioner with 15+ years of experience in growing sustainable agility. Learn from John's breadth & depth of current case studies with the "old reliable," the latest trends, and some leading & not yet well-known patterns. 

Why John Coleman?

Every PST has his/her own strengths. John Coleman is one of the few LeSS-Friendly Scrum Trainers. He regularly interviews leading lights on his YouTube channel. John is a prolific blogger on advanced topics and leads content creation for Scrum, Lean UX, measurement, Kanban, scaling, de-scaling, Executives, people & change. John teaches Marshall Goldsmith's techniques at all of his workshops in a #payitforward fashion. All of John's workshops feature Liberating Structures. John Coleman offers a number of practice tests where they are needed. John's client base consists mainly of non-native English speakers (English is the 3rd/4th language) in continental Europe. John's clients give rave reviews on Trustpilot, Google, and VocalReferences, and they get great results as long as they put in the effort.

John is Top 10 on Thinkers360 for Agility, frequently blogs on both medium and orderlydisruption, and has two podcasts: Xagility and Agility Island. He founded Executive Agility (x-agility) to create authentic sustainable organizational agility. 

Review & Ratings for John Coleman of Orderly Disruption on Google, VocalReferences & Trustpilot

Reviews & Ratings for all of John Coleman's workshops are available on: 

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  Google  - http://bit.ly/GoogleJohnC
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  TrustPilot - https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.ace.works
  
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  Vocal References - http://bit.ly/VocalRJohnC
  
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It's not just about Reviews & Ratings 

Reviews & ratings are limited by nature. John needs to understand if the learning made a real difference back in the office. So, John checks in up to 12-18 months later. He sees a pattern of improvement and regularly gets pleasant vibes from successful agility inspired by ideas on the workshops. For example, see this experience report.

Content writing

John Coleman is a Professional Scrum Trainer, a candidate LeSS trainer / LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer, organizer of ELNA (Executive Leadership Network for Adaptiveness), co-author of Kanban Guide, and author of Kanban for Complexity™ aka Kanplexity™ with lots of attribution to Dave Snowden & Cognitive Edge for Cynefin and related theory. See https://kanbanguides.org.

John made one of the most comprehensive comparisons/contrast of the scaling/descaling frameworks at https://valueglide.com/blog and https://orderlydisruption.com/blogs/grow-agility-for-your-why/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-preamble-to-1-of-4  ("Mirror Mirror" series). John Coleman's blog posts on executives, Scrum, Kanban, Nexus Vs. LeSS are available at https://bit.ly/JohnColemanBlog. John blogs prolifically at orderlydisruption.com, valueglide.com, Medium, CIO Water Cooler, and The Digital Transformation People. 

Practicing what he preaches, except he doesn't preach -- he doesn't sell, huh?

John helps teams, managers, leaders, change agents, and execs. He can answer all sorts of up-to-date questions with ease. John coaches, teaches, and consults for sustainable growth of agility in non-software as well as software. He created Broad and Deep agility (BaDa) on top of the shoulders of existing theory & practice. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUen2CeyTDk. John himself is broad & deep from the points of view of agility, people & change.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

John is a systems thinker who happens to be a huge fan of Cynefin and sees the benefits of both, erring on the side of Cynefin where they clash. Most importantly, John takes an independent view. John is also a people & change thinker; he uses Spiral Dynamics Integral (certified to level 2) and other models; even if they are criticized in some quarters as pseudoscience, John finds aspects of Spiral Dynamics helpful in structuring better conversations with people. 

More proof he knows what he's talking about and has done what he talks about

John's Scrum+Kanban Nexus+ case studies can be found (international payments company, European bank) at https://www.valueglide.com/blog/nexus-nexus-and-scrum.org-certifications. 

John is grateful to be part of Marshall Goldsmith's #payitforward campaign and, in so doing, offers free coaching/mentoring/co-training to a selection of potential agility chefs. John is a member of the #MarshallGoldsmithLead60 group, a cohort from the 16,000+ #MarshallGoldsmith100CoachesApplicants. It was a privilege for John to be one of a lucky group of 60 people; Marshall Goldsmith himself taught that group in Salt Lake City in February 2018. All of John's workshops #payitforward Marshall Goldsmith content, including Marshall's advice to John himself.

Client list

John typically practiced with many of his clients for 18+ months. He is switching to shorter-term engagements. John's client list (directly or indirectly) includes Japanese Tobacco International, Shell, Barclaycard, Vocalink Mastercard, Centrica / British Gas, the Musgrave Group, RR Donnelley, DELL, Nordic Aviation Services, 84.51, Intralinks, PaySafe, Vodafone, and Ericsson. 

Workshop Environment

Assessment preparation tends not to be covered in the workshop. The workshop focuses on attendees getting ready to apply new skills back at work immediately after the workshop. There is an expectation that attendees will attend free post-workshop Zoom calls and watch recordings of their group (or previous groups) doing tough practice tests, sometimes including John Coleman's own practice tests, which address the same learning outcomes, albeit from a different angle. John expects attendees to attend the calls, as assessment preparation does not scale on a 1:1 basis. Signing up for this workshop is effectively signing up to attend these calls.

Sometimes, John Coleman will have a co-trainer, someone already qualified or building up experience. Please let John Coleman know in advance if you need him to bring an assistant trainer who speaks your language via john@orderlydisruption.com; economics will hopefully be in our favor to allow that if there is enough demand.

Live Virtual

• Each segment is 60-75 mins long with 15-30 min breaks. Attendees can spread the workshop over several days if advertised or if other attendees are ok with that —no recording of the workshop to improve openness. The workshop size is limited to 20 attendees.
• Workshop attendees will use Zoom/Teams, Mural, Slack, StoriesOnBoard, Strategyzer, Kanbanize/SwiftKanban, and John's physical flipcharts.
• Learning online is almost as effective as face-to-face. The critical difference is working together online; it takes longer to do things. A "funnel" gets added to the Kanban Board for optional best efforts and additions to the official curriculum. Most questions will be answered to the attendees' satisfaction, one way or the other. 

Rules to follow:

• cameras on
• mics on - let's avoid delayed interventions
• be on time for every segment
• no meetings/phone calls/emails during the active segments
• be self-aware and conscious of the needs of others to have their say
• No agenda hijacking; a free coach session is offered per attendee; use that instead.

A Scrum Reset is often needed in the workshop

If the class attendees demonstrate additional ability, bonus content may be covered. However, even one attendee who has not prepared for class can set the pace to a slower pace, as per pre-class communications. While John Coleman's style is to assume zero knowledge, some attendees may have negative knowledge and incorrect preconceived ideas, according to Scrum.org.

Negative knowledge creates drag for a training class. Hence, John Coleman sometimes performs pre-training-screening-calls. While there are no formal pre-requisites for Scrum.org classes, the trainer may request in pre-training phone calls that some attendees go to Professional Scrum Foundations/Scrum Master (by any Scrum.org trainer) to ensure a smooth learning experience, even if the booked class ticket needs to be postponed to another date, refunding if necessary less banking fees. Either way, at the beginning of each workshop, some kind of Scrum reset takes place to align attendees and reduce the potential for learning drag later.

Payment, fees & cancellation

• Payment in advance is required, with no exceptions. All documentation requirements for invoice payment by the training date must be declared at the outset. 
• VAT additional for UK clients only. 
• You may cancel up to the specified online ticketing deadline, and if so, depending on the payment engine/approach, the refund could have deductions for bank transfer fees.
• You may postpone your ticket with a minimum of three business days' notice; thereafter, your lack of attendance at the booked date will be treated as a cancellation with zero refund (due to planning & venue costs for class numbers). Best efforts will be made to fit you into a later workshop.
• Electronic manuals and Scrum.org assessment fees are included. Physical manuals are not provided.

GDPR etc.

Subject to GDPR or other regulations:

• Attendees may be asked to optionally consent to receive communications, e.g., follow-up email newsletters.
• A booking does not guarantee attendance. The trainer may need to contact attendees to assess their readiness for the training class. It is possible the trainer will recommend additional training/reading before you can be accepted into the booked class.
• In order to get an assessment, the trainer must submit your name and email address to Scrum.org; Scrum.org may send you regular newsletters. 
• Attendees will be invited to a Slack channel for the class to enable communications before, during, and after the class.
• Photographs and/or video permission will be requested in class for follow-up marketing purposes.
• Reviews & Testimonials will be requested in class; you can add the same review and star rating to each of VocalReferences, TrustPilot, and Google, to be performed optionally in class. Attendees may also be asked to provide feedback to Scrum.org. For these requests, regardless of the response, additional bonus learning content will be delivered.
• A limited number of free-of-charge post-training Zoom/alternative calls are offered. To book, attendees can arrange to meet me via  https://calendly.com/johncolemanagile 
• Attendees may be asked to join compatible communities, e.g., the LeSS community.
• See the privacy statement at orderlydisruption.com