Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO®) Training

The product owner, in scrum, is accountable for maximizing the value for that product, through the work of the scrum team. The product owner is scrum’s name for a product manager. The product owner engages with customers, other stakeholders, and the scrum team to create a product backlog and to prioritize the work in the product backlog. The scrum product owner’s approach to doing this work differs in a few key ways from older, less flexible approaches.

Specifically, the product owner:

• clearly articulates and communicates the product vision or goal. The scrum team, which includes the people building the product or service, understand what they are building and why.
• prioritizes the backlog by ordering all items against each other. There is not two “#1s” or ten. The backlog items are ordered as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … 40 … and so on. They make decisions about what is more or less important.
• creates transparency around the product backlog and the product backlog items, so that it is visible and available to everyone involved.

While these ideas are often what people aim for or espouse to, the scrum product owner does them. Without transparency of work, clear decisions on priorities, and clarity of goal, we can’t expect teams to be engaged and deliver. The scrum product owner understands this and is accountable to provide these to the scrum team and organization.

Throughout the course, you will have an opportunity to engage in practical, reality-based work with small groups. Explore what the product owner is accountable for in the scrum framework, learn new ways to engage customers to understand what they truly need, and create product backlog items and refine them. You will have the opportunity to dig into the tough questions about project vs product thinking and create dialogue in your organization about the problem of too much work in process.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an agile framework used to get work done. Scrum works in a variety of situations, but it thrives when either the work or the environment is complex and not as predicable as we would like. Scrum focuses on delivering incrementally in small chunks, to allow us to learn more and adapt, rather than just continuing to deliver things that are no longer needed or perhaps never were.

Scrum is based on the principles of inspection, adaptation, and transparency. These three principles are the foundation to being success in the face of complexity. Transparency allows people to see issues, challenges, and places that can be improved. Inspection and adaptation focus on continuous learning and improvement. Scrum consists of a number of events, artifacts, jobs to be done, and practices. You can read more about Scrum in the Scrum Guide, which is free to read or download.

Who Should Attend

This course should be attended by anyone who wants to understand what the product owner role is and how the product owner does their job.

• Product Owners, Product Managers, Business Analysts, QA Testers
• Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters
• Scrum team members, agile team members
• Managers, directors, and others tasked with helping teams succeed with scrum and agile (very hard to do if you do not understand it)
• Anyone outside of software or IT: Our product owner training covers topics and examples that are applicable to those outside of software. We also offer training specifically geared to product management and product ownership outside of software

What to Expect

We take training and learning seriously. We respect the investment of both time and money that you are making to advance your skills. As such, we use the latest training approaches and techniques. We also bring energy and fun to ensure you have the best possible experience and learn as much as possible. In this course, you can expect:

• Brain-friendly training to dramatically increase learning and retention (instructors are Certified Training from the Back of the Room Trainers).
• Opportunities throughout the course to focus on your real-world situations.
• In-depth engagement with your instructors and fellow attendees. If you are looking for a dry lecture (we use zero slides), this class is NOT for you!
• Interactive, fun, and experiential learning — increasing safety and retention — laughing helps learning.
• Challenging work with others that focuses on your real organizational issues.

Learning Objectives

• Examine where typical product owner (product manager) roles align with the Scrum Framework
• Compare the types of business decisions you and your organization make and decide if those are sufficient
• Illustrate how risks and assumptions are handled in Scrum by product owners (product managers); summarize how agile adds value and the types of value
• Review common reasons why visions and product goals are not motivating and discuss characteristics that make up good visions
• Compare types of stakeholders and contrast stakeholder analysis approaches
• Learn how customer segmentation is often done wrong and a better approach to understanding customer needs
• Analyze a case study for stakeholders jobs, pains and gains, and review the impact in your work
• Learn the key attributes of a product backlog and analyze a bad product backlog and find errors
• Explore the differences between products and projects and how they impact risk
• Uncover the simplicity and challenge of handling multiple products in one backlog with one or more teams
• Take an in-depth look at backlog refinement and what it means to have backlog items ready for sprint planning
• Illustrate the typical problems with ‘epics’ and why they don’t typically add any value; then learn about a better option to help slice epics
• Analyze a project request for valuable features, then create detailed assessments and a feature backlog
• Break down features into stories and compile a list of user stories
• Slice user stories into smaller parts, using multiple refinement approaches; explain what a vertical slice is and its value
• Learn exactly what the definition of done should be, why it is challenging, and understand the pros and cons of multiple definitions of done
• Learn why a product backlog is almost never sufficient and how roadmaps, release maps, and Product Boards present much more clarity and content for teams, product owners (product managers), and stakeholders — and how to create one

Details

Course Length: 2 full day sessions 8:30AM-5:00PM Arizona Time (a total of 2 days ) + pre-work

Level: Introductory to Intermediate (ask about more in-depth versions)

Prerequisites

• An interest in learning and discovering new ideas
• Desire to engage with other and participate throughout the course

Course Credit

• 15 PMI PDUs
• 15 Scrum Alliance SEUs
• Qualified to become a CSPO (registration fee is included in the course fee)

Course Facilitator

Jake Calabrese

Jake is a coach, trainer, and coach-consultant working to help organizations meet the promise of agile by going beyond agile practices to address culture challenges and help teams and leaders reach and maintain high performance. He has unique expertise as an Organization & Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC), a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), and Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and as a trainer and coach for Agile Companies (helping non-software organizations use agile). Jake created the AgileSafari cartoon series to introduce humor into the more challenging issues we have to tackle. Jake uses ideas from various areas of thinking such as: Lean, professional coaching, neuroscience, psychology, facilitation, brain-based training, improvisation, agile, kanban, and scrum. Jake regularly speaks at local and national conferences including Mile High Agile, Scrum Gathering, and Agile Alliance Agile20xx conferences.