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.
Product Owners need not be experts in the process; that is the job of the ScrumMaster. They do however need enough understanding to know when the ScrumMaster needs additional training/help, and sufficient understanding of the Agile Manifesto to use it as a guide for their own behaviour making.
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 or Roman Pichler’s book. These are listed in our book list.
Course Content
Note: The topics below are a guide and may be adapted to suit the needs of the participants.
Day One
1. Why Product Owner? (reason to exist)
Why are you here? What do you need to learn to accomplish the why? Build a map.
Agile Manifesto, Scrum, Lean hand-outs
Why the need for role as opposed to person
Responsibility contour
Responsibility contour in Agile Product Management
Bridging the responsibility gap
Responsibility conflicts
- Define personal learning objectives
- Understand the Product Owner role [in Agile/Lean] (importance and behaviour)
- See the manifesto as a safety net
- Identify responsibility gaps in their situation
2. Product Vision (why are you doing it)
Why, how and examples (Nike / SAP / Crisp – Henrik / kazang)
Vision box
Elevator statement
Press release
CEO’s email
Data sheet (one-pager)
Kano model
Personas and scenarios
Jim Highsmith’s pattern
Business model Canvas
- Understand the importance of a Vision
- Understand how a vision works (decision-guiding living document)
- Have a list of techniques and examples
- Create a 1st pass vision and test it on other delegates
3. Product Management (strategy towards vision)
High level requirements
Strategic indicators
- Understand the importance of persona’s
- How to build a story/card map
- Know that strategic indicators exists and how they can be used
- Personal story map skeleton annotated with indicators
4. Structuring work (gearing for release planning with iterations)
Iterative-incremental user stories
Just-enough, just-in-time product management
Definition of Ready
When to groom / refine
- Know the various User Story patterns
- Understand “Specification by Example” – acceptance criteria
- Temporal nature of User Stories (format and granularity)
- Practice writing examples
- Practice splitting examples
- Identify which pattern to start with an the backlog structure (where, what, how much, etc.)
- Formulate a definition of ready
Day Two
5. Applying lean start-up principles to agile product management (understand the system)
Designing effective experiments (team and market)
Uncovering user preferences without building features
Growth vs scaling
- Value of understanding the system
- Know what is needed to understand their system
- Understand what complexity means and the effect on the Product Owner
- Know how feedback loops and experiments work
- Build a list of variables/hypothesis to uncover with experiments
6. Ordering of features (based on understanding of system)
KANO feature ranking
Cost of delay
ROI
Scaling / portfolio management
7. Release planning (learning or earning – when and with what to market)
Planning releases with emerging requirements
Fixed date vs. fixed scope release planning
Managing releases under uncertainty
- Understand the variables of release planning
- Understand estimation techniques (how to avoid abuse)
- Understand the statistics of release planning
- Practice release planning in simulation over a number of iterations
- Decide on actions to build a release plan
8. Action Plan (from day 2 until day 3)
Actions
When do you need help?
- Prioritise learning into action backlog
- Define done for the first two items
- Identify who to involve and tasks of first two items
- Understand anti-patterns and when to ask for help (types of help)
- Explain and commit to actions
Day three (two to four weeks later)
The third day of this course takes place two to four weeks after the initial two days. Course participants will return and jointly review and reflect on their accomplishments and learning during their time away. The teaching will be geared dynamically towards addressing gaps.
- Participants will leave day three with a revised continuous improvement plan for the rest of their lives
