Professional Scrum Product Owner

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 drives value from their products.

The 2-day Professional Scrum Product Owner course focuses on all of these areas to teach students how to maximize the value of software products and systems.

PSPO is the 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 more clear 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 is made up of discussions and hands-on exercises based upon real-life cases.

Who Should Attend?

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

Course Topics

Agile Product Management

Delegates explore the traditional practice of product management and how an agile approach can provide a competitive advantage. Rather than success being defined up front in terms of time, scope and budget; we highlight the aim of agile product management: optimizing the value of the product at the point of delivery. The case study project spanning the whole class is initiated as delegates chose a seed of an idea for a new product (or use their own real-life products). To establish the feasibility of the idea, teams will create a business model and vision.

Value Driven Development

The primary job of a product owner is to optimize the value of their product, but value is a subjective measure. Delegates discuss what value means for their organisations and learn a range of techniques to help them maximize the value created by development teams:

• How to assess the current value of a product.
• Measuring and influencing the cost and lead time required to get an idea to market.
• Improving innovation rates by managing technical overheads and customer usage.

Scrum Framework, Theory and Empiricism

Delegates explore the nature of software and the effect of uncertainty in planning and release management. Scrum is defined as an empirical process of regular inspection and adaption, and we see how product owners can use it as a risk management strategy by frequently refining an imperfect plan rather than seeking to anticipate every variable.

We define and describe the Scrum framework core elements and relate them back to agile principles and empiricism. Having defined the framework within which agile product management may be achieved, delegates apply this to a number of product delivery scenarios such as re-writing legacy applications with new technology.

Product Backlog Management and Release Planning

Delegates learn industry standard practices for effective product backlog management:

• Reducing waste by analyzing items to the level of detail required at the time.
• User stories and acceptance criteria as options for expressing requirements.
• Product initiation workshop techniques including user story mapping and story point estimation.

Delegates will create a product backlog, and then work out “when will it be done, and what will be in scope”. We’ll explore how this release plan with projected costs is likely to evolve and how it may be planned and revised:

• Release strategies; from infrequent major releases to small, functional releases.
• Forecasting release dates using velocity.
• Date-driven vs feature-driven planning.

Professional Scrum Product Owner Outcomes

Delegates will leave with a comprehensive understanding of the practices and accountabilities of the product owner role, and will know how to get started in fulfilling it. Experienced product owners will leave with renewed confidence, and a collection of new techniques to try.

Assessment

Part of the training is the possibility to validate your knowledge with the online assessment for Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I). After the training, you will receive a coupon for free participation. If you do not pass the assessment within two weeks, you will receive another coupon for free. Additionally, you will receive a 40% discount on the Professional Scrum Product Owner II (PSPO II) assessment. The certificates are recognized industry-wide due to the thorough assessment. Certificates purchased at Scrum.org are valid for life.

Under PMI guidelines, the successful completion of this class merits fourteen PDUs.