Course Category: Agile Methods
Course Duration: 2 Days
Hours: 14 Contact Hours

Course Overview

The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course is a two day intensive introduction on product visioning, feature exploration and requirement management based on the Scrum framework.  The course illustrates how Scrum and agile product management practices are applied by Product Owner and Scrum teams to validate ideas, evolve requirements, and deliver potentially shippable products in frequent, time-boxed iterations.

The course uses a combination of lectures, role-plays and exercises to impart understanding on the roles and activities the Product Owner and his/her team. The Scrum framework is applied in a mini-project simulation where the concepts of user stories, agile estimation, and release planning are practiced.

Who Should Attend

The course is open to all. There are no prerequisites or pre-reading required. All you need is an open mind, a desire to succeed, and maybe a pen.

In our experience people with the following background, get the most benefit from attending:

  1. Prospective Product Owners wanting to prepare for their upcoming role
  2. Practicing Product Owners wanting to hone their craft
  3. Traditional Product Managers wanting to know what all this Product Ownership business is about
  4. ScrumMasters wanting to broaden their knowledge of Scrum
  5. Managers of all kinds wanting to improve how they select, work with and manage Product Owners
  6. Stakeholders of all kinds wanting to better understand Scrum from a business perspective and how to get their needs met
  7. Customers wanting to better understand how Scrum works and what is expected of them
  8. UX, UI, & BA – a trio of roles long neglected by Agile. Whether you’re wanting to learn how to work with, or become a Product Owner, this course will give you the practical and definitive answers you’ve been looking for.
  9. Traditional Project Managers wanting to better integrate with existing Scrum Teams or wanting to pivot into Product Ownership.
  10. Anybody curious about Design Thinking in general or more specifically how it works with Scrum.

Certification

The participant is expected to complete the following to be CSPO certified:

  • Self-study the prerequisite reading provided prior to the course participation
  • Attend the course with not lower than 75% attendance.
  • Participate in the group discussions and exercises during the class.
  • Register with Scrum Alliance

The certificate is achieved through course completion. There is no test or exam.

Detailed Agenda

A Product Owners Perspective on Scrum

Learn how to see Scrum not as a series of baffling rituals and obscure artefacts, but rather from the Product Owner’s perspective; as a tool that helps you stick to schedules, manage risks and generate business value quickly and effectively.

  1. Working productively with other members of your Team
  2. Working effectively with your ScrumMaster
  3. Keeping stakeholders, users and customers happy
  4. Implementing Product Ownership well in any context
  5. Scaling the Product Owner Role efficiently and effectively

How Organisational and Industry Context Affects Product Ownership

You will learn:

  1. How your context shapes your implementation of the Scrum Framework
  2. Tools to help you best implement Product Ownership in your context whilst still retaining as many core benefits as possible
  3. How your implementation affects the kinds of benefits you should expect to get from Scrum. What you should expect will get better, and what might stay the same.

The Fundamentals of Design Thinking

Design thinking is more than just beards and buzzwords, it’s a proven way of approaching product development and problem solving that produces great results and fits together beautifully with Scrum.

Learn:

  1. What Design Thinking actually is
  2. The Benefits of taking a Design Thinking Approach
  3. How Design Thinking differs from typical enterprise approaches
  4. Important ways in which Traditional Design and Design Thinking differ
  5. How Design Thinking implementations can go wrong (pitfalls to avoid!)
  6. How to use Scrum and Design Thinking together
  7. The Role of the Product Owner in Design Thinking

Product Ownership Practices

Release Planning

The afternoon of Day Two is given over to our exclusive Release Planning Exercise.

“Release Planning” is the glue that bridges the gap between Agile and the Enterprise. It’s the process that provides the answer to the question some believe is unanswerable with Scrum:

“What am I going to get and when am I going to get it?”

Working as a team, students will be given the opportunity to apply everything they’ve learned so far and maybe even gain a few new insights to boot!

Our Release Planning Exercise is hands on and concrete. It makes the abstract real and joins up the dots.

We’ll start with a vision and end with not just a backlog, but a plan that we’ll have confidence in executing on.

Students have come away from this exercise calling it “engaging and transformative”. It’s so effective in fact that some organisations have licensed it from us for ongoing in-house use.

Course Category: Agile Methods
Course Duration: 2 Days
Hours: 14 Contact Hours