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

Overview

This intense interactive training workshop focuses on Scrum’s Product Owner role, which focuses on visioning, roadmapping, and user stories.

Scrum is a proven lean and agile approach to delivering results, a simple “inspect and adapt” framework used to organize work for maximum efficiency and effectiveness using three roles, three ceremonies, and three artifacts wherein stories express requirements and tasks express work.

While the Product Owner role is conceptually simple and involves a few guidelines, the role emphasizes a particular mindset. Many product owners enact the role, but don’t readily internalize the mindset, and thus don’t experience the benefits of the role.

This workshop not only provides participants with the skills for creating compelling visions, actionable roadmaps, and useful requirements using agile techniques, but it also gives participants practical hands-on experience applying these techniques throughout the workshop. Participants will be introduced to agility and create a vision, roadmap, and work with user roles, user stories, and acceptance tests.

This is not mere presentation-based training but a workshop using experiential learning (learning by doing, including robust simulations and discussions). It is facilitated by active practitioners / coachs with decades of real-world industry experience, which is used to highlight and expose participants to many common pitfalls. Experiential learning techniques are used to illustrate key concepts in a comprehensive manner that is interactively tailored to the participants’ particular needs. Participants will not only gain a foundational understanding, but will also gain practical insight around the nuances of putting the techniques into practice to maximize results.

Agenda

Overview
            Agility: Values and Principles
            Agile Framework: Roles, Artifacts, and Ceremonies

Agile Visioning: Crafting a Vision
            Problems and Solutions
            Stakeholders and Users
            Needs and Features
            Assumptions, Dependencies, and Constraints
            Other Requirements

Agile Roadmapping: Crafting a Roadmap
            Layers
            Releases and Milestones
            Elements and Dependencies

Working with User Roles, User Stories, and Acceptance Tests
            Understanding Context and Users
            User Stories and Gathering Techniques
            INVEST in Good Stories
            Acceptance Tests and Detailing User Stories

The Product Owner in the Enterprise (for more reading review scrum topics and other sources)

This course is for people who have some background in agile project work. It is intended to help experienced agile practitioners focus on the difficult challenges of tuning aspects of their agile implementation:

• Product management and marketing professionals (directors and product managers, technical product managers, and product marketing managers)
• Product development professionals (analysts and user-experience/interaction/visual designers, application architects and designers, developers, and testers)
• Project management professionals (project managers and project/team leaders)
• Scrum course students (e.g. attendees of “Certified ScrumMaster”) desiring a "deep dive" into techniques for more effective Sprints
• ScrumMasters who wish to improve their team's sprint planning effectiveness
• Agile development team members who want to better support product owners
• Project managers who want to integrate agile plans with their organization's traditional project management needs
• Product Owners seeking better inform both strategic views and tactical team realities

Prerequisites

• Participants should have some familiarity with Agile, either by attending beginner Agile training or through some practical Agile experience.
• Participants should be prepared to review the problem domain background material prior to attending the session.