LeanDog

Certified Scrum Product Owner

In this information-packed course, you will learn the core concepts and skills to work effectively as a Scrum product owner. Moving beyond just learning the Scrum role responsibilities, you’ll be exposed to proven practices for effectively fulfilling your responsibilities within a Scrum process framework.

You’ll come away from this course learning how to work with your team and stakeholders to:

• Identify the business benefits to priorities
• Understand customers and users
• Build a product backlog
• Design the user interface

By leveraging the whole team, you’ll ease your workload, and help everyone else become active involved champions for a successful product – just like you are.

What Does This Course Cover?

• Discovery process planning
• Identifying MPGs: measurable product goals
• Creating customer and organizational profiles
• Creating lightweight pragmatic user personas
• User interview basics
• User Story Mapping to understand users and their use of your product
• Incremental release planning
• Design studio for collaborative user interface ideation
• Paper prototyping and testing user interface
• User story splitting and thinning
• Tactical release planning and management
• Release readiness assessment
• Workshop planning and facilitation

What Will You Get From This Course?

• Effectively collaborating with and managing stakeholders
• Creating alignment with the team and stakeholders around common measurable product goals
• Forming productive and collaborative customers and end-user relationships
• Productive meeting and workshop facilitation
• Planning and carrying out product discovery sessions to build a product backlog, envision and estimate the product, and plan incremental releases
• Knowing what’s necessary to design and validate usable user interfaces
• Planning the product construction sprint by sprint
• Releasing on time by managing risks and maximizing learning while building software

Why This Course is Different

It’s about the product, not the process. Instead of focusing on filling process obligations, you’ll learn practices for identifying and steering the development of successful products. Scrum’s process obligations are relatively simple. Building confidence and clarity around product success simplifies meeting those obligations.

It’s about understanding product benefit, not just features. A product built on time with the required features doesn’t ensure success. You’ll see how to identify and steer product releases towards the desired benefit for your company, your customers, and your users.

It’s about customer experience. Product success is an outcome of a successful customer and user experience. You’ll learn practices for understanding and engaging your users and customers.

It’s about design thinking. You’ll see how great products don’t come from captured requirements, but from a deep understanding of the problems to be solved, and an effective approach to identifying and validating solutions. This is design thinking.

It’s about collaboration. The best products come from collaborative teams aligned around a common purpose. Effective collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. In this course, you’ll build the facilitation skills to get your entire team successfully collaborating with each other.

Who Should Take This Course

The stressed product owner: if you’re currently working as a product owner, or about to, this class will supply you with concepts and practice to help you confidently succeed.

The in-between team member: if you’re a business analyst or user experience person, your responsibilities may be a bit ambiguous. We’ll focus on your role as a product ownership team member handling day-to-day tactical product ownership.

The product inventor: if your passion is creating great products, then you’ll learn many valuable practices to help you do that inside a Scrum process framework.

The Scrum and agile coach: if you’re focused on helping product owners and teams succeed, you’ll learn a variety of practices to teach others, and use yourself.

This Course is Not For:

The portfolio manager: if you’re managing large portfolios of products, you’ll likely find this class a bit tactical for your tastes. While there’s useful information here, it won’t address your toughest problems.

The transient product owner: if you find yourself in a product owner role and trying to do a good job while waiting for a better opportunity, you may find the intense focus on product success and customer experience a bit tiring. This class is for the passionate product owner.

Before You Come

You should come with a basic understanding of Scrum and agile approaches. We won’t burn much time in the class getting participants up to speed here.

The new product development game. In preparation for this course you’ll receive a PDF of the Harvard Business Review article that helped motivate the creation of Scrum. It’ll help you to identify the style of product invention we’re striving for in Scrum.

Before the class you’ll be sent valuable information, which will help you to prepare. Information includes a short reading list that will include the Scrum Guide — a short 14-page primer on Scrum. This will give you the vocabulary you’ll need to launch head-first into effective product ownership practice.

Course Outline

Day 1: Understanding the Product You're Building

• Scrum and product owner essentials
• Identifying the benefit your product delivers
• Understanding your users
• Mapping your product backlog

Day 2: Guiding the product to successful delivery and beyond

• Planning valuable product releases
• Envisioning the customer experience
• Guiding products to success sprint by sprint
• Product ownership variations and scaling techniques