The Scrum Product Owner

The Scrum Product Owner must lead the project strategically, collaborate with customers and team on a daily basis, and manage the business value. The Scrum Product Owner takes back the accountability from the traditional project manager for delivering the right solution to the customer and end-user. The CSPO course will provide you with the core of skills to support this awesome responsibility.

IMPORTANT NOTE

The CSPO course curriculum has been upgraded for 2010. THIS IS NO LONGER AN ENTRY-LEVEL COURSE. Pre-requisites for attendance are at least one of the following:

• Active engagement in a Scrum team in the Product Owner role
• Active engagement in a Scrum team as a Business Analyst (responsible for creating Agile requirements)
• Previous attendance at a CSM class and experience in the ScrumMaster role.

In addition, it is highly desirable that you have read at least one of Mike Cohn’s books. These are listed in our book list.

Course Content

1. Understanding the product owner role

Group exercise: 4 questions for product owners
3 Things product owners need
Desirable product owner characteristics
Product owner responsibilities
Product owner smells

2. The product mindset

The product vision
Group exercise: Visioning
Domain driven design (DDD) concepts
User experience design (UX) concepts
Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) concepts

3. Agile requirements

Gathering requirements
Writing better stories
Story smells
Writing acceptance test scenarios
Test smells
Group exercise: Story-writing workshop
When do we write requirements?
Who writes them?
How much do we write?

4. Communication

Talking to users
Listening to the team
Stakeholder communications
Sketching and paper prototypes
Group exercise: communication
ScrumMaster and product owner

5. The product backlog

Features versus stories
Epics and Themes
Emergence
Business value focus
Dealing with technical debt
How and when to groom the backlog
Backlog smells
Some techniques for prioritising
Group exercise: business value game
Some techniques for estimating
Group exercise: affinity-based estimating
When do we estimate?
When do we re-estimate?
Estimation smells

6. The product owner’s role in the sprint

Sprint goals
Sprint length
Timing of sprint meetings
Preparation for and leading sprint planning
Group exercise: sprint planning role-play
Preparation for and leading the sprint review
Sprint retrospective
Other meetings
Daily work

7. Planning and monitoring

Release planning
Product roadmaps
Monitoring progress using burndown and burnup charts
Group exercise: release planning and monitoring
Communicating progress
Visual management
Metrics
Portfolio planning
Using tools

8. Scaling

Scaling patterns
Product owner team
Group exercise: scaling
Scaling smells

9. Contracts

Techniques for fixed price / time / scope projects