About the course:

Scrum is a simple but powerful agile management framework. Key to its success is the role of the Product Owner: The Product Owner steers and guides the Scrum project, bridges the gap between end customers, business and development/IT and is responsible for the return on investment (ROI).

This two-day interactive course equips you with all you need to know about being an effective product owner.

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 wlll 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 including forecasting the project progress, grooming the product backlog, and effectively collaborating with the ScrumMaster and team in the sprint meetings.

This interactive course teaches practical techniques through instructions and hands-on exercises.

Audience

Product managers, product marketers, business analysts, requirements engineers, project managers and ScrumMasters who would like to deepen their understanding of the Product Owner role and related practices.

Prerequisites

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

• Roman Pichler. Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love. Addison-Wesley. Not published yet. Students can read the online version or print at http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780321684165
• Ken Schwaber. Scrum Guide. http://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guides

Contents

Introduction

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

Scrum Roles

• 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

Visioning and The Product Vision

• 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

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

Release Management

• 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

Sprints

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

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

Transitions (optional)

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

After the course the student will receive a link to Scrum Alliance, where he can creat a profile as a Certified Product Owner and print a certificate.