Learn the essentials of working as a Product Owner in this two-day class.

Learn what it takes to work as an effective product owner from a leading expert on product ownership and agile product management. Roman has a long track record in teaching and coaching Scrum product owners. He is the author of two books on Scrum including the product owner's guide to creating successful products with Scrum.

Attending this course will enable you to understand the product owner role in depth and learn the practices necessary to succeed as a product owner. This includes the product owner duties, the role's authority, and its interaction with the other Scrum roles and stakeholders such as customers, users, sales, marketing, and management. You will understand how product planning, product discovery and product definition work in Scrum including taking advantage of early customer feedback and emergent requirements. The course also teaches you how to turn a product vision into a successful product by forecasting the project progress, grooming the product backlog, and effectively collaborating with the ScrumMaster and team in the sprint meetings. (Please click on the "Agenda" tab for more details.)

This interactive course teaches practical techniques through instructions and hands-on exercises. For attendee feedback visit romanpichler.com/about.html.

Prerequisites

Participants should be familiar with the basics of product management. All participants should read the following books prior to the class:

• Roman Pichler. Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love. Addison-Wesley. 2010.
• Ken Schwaber. Scrum Guide.

Scrum Refresher

• Agile values and Scrum origins
• Scrum flow
• Empirical management
• Definition of done

Understanding the Product Owner Role

• Product owner, team and ScrumMaster: authority, responsibility and collaboration
• Product owner team and hierarchies
• Desirable qualities of the product owner
• A day in the life of the product owner
• Common product owner mistakes

Envisioning the Product

• The product vision
• Benefits of the product vision
• The vision in action
• Desirable qualities
• The minimal marketable product
• Simplicity and Ockham’s Razor
• The vision and the product roadmap
• Techniques for creating a powerful vision

Working with the Product Backlog

• Product discovery and requirements in Scrum
• Product backlog characteristics
• Product backlog structure and form
• Grooming the product backlog
• Identifying and describing items: user stories on the product backlog
• Prioritising the product backlog
• Getting the backlog ready for sprint planning
• Progressively decomposing and refining items
• Collaborative grooming workshops
• Non-functional requirements on the product backlog

Planning the Release

• The project levers and the cone of uncertainty
• Software quality
• Timeboxed releases
• Early and frequent releases
• Quarterly cycles
• Estimating product backlog items with story points and planning poker
• Choosing the right sprint length
• Determining velocity
• Working with the release burndown chart and bar
• Creating the release plan
• Tracking and reporting the project progress

Leveraging the Sprint Meetings

• Sprint characteristics
• Formulating powerful sprint goals
• Sprint planning, Daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective

Succeeding with Large and Distributed Scrum Projects (optional)

• Brook’s Law
• Organic growth and Conway’s Law
• Team set-up
• Multi-team planning and coordination
• Shared norms and assets
• Dispersed teams
• Distributed Scrum project tips

Establishing Scrum Product Ownership (optional)

• Becoming a great product owner
• Developing great product owners
• Making Scrum product ownership stick

• Product owners
• Product managers
• Product marketers
• Creative directors
• Producers
• Business analysts
• Requirements engineers
• UX Designers
• Project managers
• ScrumMasters and coaches who would like to deepen their understanding of product ownership in Scrum