Certified Scrum Product Owner

Passionate Product Ownership

Though each CSPO course varies depending on the instructor, all Certified Scrum Product Owner courses focus on Scrum from a product owner's perspective. Graduates will receive the CSPO designation. All CSPO course are taught by Certified Scrum Trainers.

Passionate Product Ownership combines the best of Scrum and agile iterative and increment thinking with solid product management, and pragmatic user experience design practice.  The result goes beyond the standard 2-day process course to an experience that will expose you to new ways of thinking and working.  You’ll leave with tools that help you make better choices about what software to build, and ways to plan and execute software delivery that speed learning and time to market.

What’s taught in Passionate Product Ownership is based on the underlying philosophy that you should: Judge the success of your process based on the satisfaction of your users and customers with your product

You’ll learn new concepts and practices:

This course covers concepts and practices you won’t find in other courses such as:

Using a team-based approach to product ownership  

Effective collaboration and facilitation skills including techniques for shared problem solving and creating shared ownership
User-centric practices from the user experience design communities to envision the software from the user’s perspective  

Outcome-centric design and planning to maximum benefit from the minimum amount of software built

 Emphasis on product discovery to learn quickly and collaboratively what should be built.  You’ll learn how to structure and facilitate an initial discovery or “sprint 0” phase to build your backlog and plan incremental releases.  

Design thinking approaches that emphasize problem understanding, ideation, iteration, and plans that maximize learning and feedbackInnovative emergent best practices in agile product design including:

• User story mapping
• Pragmatic personas
• Design studio
• Paper prototyping
• Lightweight usability testing

Day 1: Product Ownership, Product Team, and Product Discovery

The Agile & Scrum Foundation
•    Agile & Scrum values & principles
•    The essential Scrum process

Product Ownership
•    Product management, product engineering, and project management
•    The product team
•    The product owner’s process

Product Discovery
•    Collaborative workshops and facilitation
•    Problem analysis and solution definition
•    Planning product discovery
•    Project chartering

Identifying Business Value
•    Synthesizing business strategy as measurable product goals
•    The revenue model

Understanding Users
•    Lightweight personas
•    User research
•    User collaboration

Creating the Product Backlog
•    User stories
•    User story mapping
•    User scenarios

Day 2: Planning, Delivering and Improving

Planning Valuable Product Releases
•    Minimal marketable feature, and minimal viable product
•    Incremental release planning
•    Creating a release roadmap
 

Envisioning the User Experience
•    Sketchboard and design studio for collaborative UI envisioning
•    User experience story boards
•    UI framework & patterns
 

Products Success Sprint by Sprint
•    Iterative and incremental strategies
•    Opening, mid, and end-game chess strategies
•    Story splitting and thinning
•    Subjective and objective quality

Product Ownership and the Sprint Cycle
•    Product team planning
•    User story workshops
•    UI design & user testing
•    Acceptance criteria workshops
•    Sprint planning
•    Working with the team
•    User story acceptance
•    Product review
•    Sprint retrospectives

1. Those filling the Scrum Product Owner or Agile Customer role
2. The extended team of people supporting the product owner to identify and describe what to build
3. The people responsible for supporting effective process in their organization

While there may be a single person who has final say about product strategy and direction, it takes a product team to make sense of the requests, requirements, research, and hunches that lead to good product decisions.  It takes a team to design and describe a product solution, and to validate that solution before, during, and after the delivery of working software.  Lots of traditional role act as part of a holistic product team including:
•    Product Managers
•    Program Managers
•    Business Analysts
•    User Experience (UX) Practitioners
•    Architects and senior developers
•    QA and testers

It takes focused attention to how we work to build great products.  Those responsible for process health and improvement will get value from the in-depth understanding of product ownership.  Those roles include:
•    Scrum Masters and agile coaches
•    Project Managers
•    Process improvement specialists