The role of the Product Owner is the most important role in product delivery. The balance between product features and the go-live date is determined by the Product Owner. The Product Owner makes the difficult decisions on which features to invest in and which to leave for later development. If you own a product, the success of a product determines the success of your career, then you need rights to direct product development, and it brings responsibilities when tough choices have to be made.
Welcome to the Certified Scrum Product Owner class where two days are focused on learning about the Scrum process and on practicing the skills of a Product Owner. After an introduction into core Scrum and the roles of Scrum, we dive into actual Product Development and use the principles of Five Levels of Planning to create vision, plans and requirements for an actual app.
The class makes for two days of hard work to discuss and practice Scrum along with the activities which are core to the role of the Product Owner. All aspects of Scrum are covered and no questions are avoided. A strong focus on the Product Owner role does not stop discussions on implementing Scrum, scaling, working with distributed teams and other topics, even though these activities may be more often handled by Scrum Masters. Pragmatic use of Scrum and the questions from the attendees are the core of a Product Owner class!
OBJECTIVES
- Learn the concepts of Core Scrum as required by the Scrum Alliance to obtain the CSPO certification
- Answer questions about Product Development with Scrum
- Practice and see examples of teams building products with Scrum – real life pictures and stories
- Discuss the impact of large projects, with many participants who are not always co-located – outsourcing is regular topic of discussions
- Learn about requirements management, stories and epics – their use and the position within other techniques like use cases and wire frames
- Learn about central role of the Product Owner and the impact of working with a Proxy Product Owner is evaluated
- Build hands-on experience with the concepts of Scrum and the Five Levels of Planning through exercises and discussions
TOPICS
- Agile & Scrum at 10,000 feet: Agile principles and the values on the Agile Manifesto
- Scrum Framework overview and Scrum Values discussion
- Roles in Scrum, Development Team, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the Scrum Team concept. Plus the mapping to the product management roles in your organization: executive and vp level, product management, business analysts, graphic and usability designers, solutions architects and development teams
- Long term planning: setting a vision for the product; creating a delivery roadmap based on the vision
- Product Backlog: principles of just in time detail; refinement of the backlog, when and how; user stories: format and use
- Estimating the work on the backlog
- Prioritizing work on the backlog
- Ordering work for larger deliveries with multiple teams and taking multiple Sprints to get the work done – Release Planning
- Sprints: Sprint Planning – who, what & how; A few words on engineering practices; daily meetings: the Scrum and the Scrum of Scrums; done and accepted;
- Progress reporting and popular techniques – burn-down charts, quality, burn-up charts, task boards; often a brief discussion on tools happens here
- Feedback on Product Development through reviews and retrospectives
KNOWLEDGE FOR YOU
Prerequisites. None. (Reading the Scrum Guide prior to the class is helpful)
Geared To. This class is suitable for product managers, product specialists, designers, analysts and people who drive or influence product development in the organization.
Handouts. You will receive a workbook along with a valuable set of support materials: background reading, articles written by me and others, sample Product & Sprint Backlog in spreadsheet format and a lot more.
Benefits. Not many Product Owners are a PMP or ACP, but if you are then you can claim 14 PDUs for your certification with the PMI!
