Course Schedule

Week 1: Agile Product Management
Delegates explore the traditional practice of product management and how an agile approach can provide a competitive advantage. Rather than success being defined upfront in terms of time, scope and budget; we highlight the aim of agile product management: optimising the value of the product at the point of delivery.

Week 1 Assignment: Understand how we work
Facilitate a discussion within your organisation about your current process and practices used for product development and create an explicit description of them.

Week 2: Product Inception Case Study
Using either a “starter idea” provided, or a real-world product idea from the participant, we’ll kick off a case study project to be built up over the rest of the programme. In this first session, we’ll look at the use of business modelling and value proposition development to assess feasibility. We’ll then look at the role of the product owner in creating and communicating a vision.

Week 2 Assignment: Making assumptions explicit
Use one of the modelling techniques from this session on your own product, and see what is made visible in the process. Taking this as a snapshot of the present, identify something you would like to change and articulate the potential value in doing so.

Week 3: Value-Driven Development
The primary job of a product owner is to optimise the value of their product, but the value is a subjective measure. Delegates discuss what value means for their organisations and learn a range of techniques to help them maximise the value created by development teams:

• How to assess the current value of a product.
• Measuring and influencing the cost and lead time required to get an idea to market.
• Improving innovation rates by managing technical overheads and customer usage.

Week 3 Assignment: Becoming more agile
Identify improvement in your current process based on your understanding of how the principles of Agile and Scrum can benefit the team in addressing complexities in product development and apply at least one change to validate its feasibility.

Week 4: Scrum Framework, Theory and Empiricism
Delegates explore the nature of software and the effect of uncertainty in planning and release management. Scrum is defined as an empirical process of regular inspection and adaption, and we see how product owners can use it as a risk management strategy by frequently refining an imperfect plan rather than seeking to anticipate every variable.
We define and describe the Scrum framework’s core elements and relate them back to agile principles and empiricism. Having defined the framework within which agile product management may be achieved, delegates apply this to a number of product delivery scenarios such as re-writing legacy applications with new technology.

Week 4 Assignment: Scrum exists only in its entirety
Identify deviations of your current process from Scrum or true team self-management as defined in the Scrum Guide and apply at least one change that reduces the differences.

Week 5: Product Backlog Management
Delegates learn industry standard practices for effective product backlog management:

• Reducing waste by analysing items to the level of detail required at the time.
• User stories and acceptance criteria as options for expressing requirements.
• Product initiation workshop techniques including user story mapping and story point estimation.

This will be applied in practice by creating a product backlog for the class case study product.

Week 5: Assignment: Improving the conduct of Scrum Events
Evaluate how you are currently using transparency in your Scrum Events to inspect and adapt and apply at least one improvement to increase transparency or improve the flow of the Scrum Event.

Week 6: Release Planning and Preparing for PSPO-I
Delegates will take their product backlog from the previous session, and work out “when will it be done, and what will be in scope”. We’ll explore how this release plan with projected costs is likely to evolve and how it may be planned and revised:

• Release strategies; from infrequent major releases to small, functional releases.
• Forecasting release dates using velocity.
• Data-driven vs feature-driven planning.

There will also be an opportunity to review the PSPO-I assessment topics, with resources and recommendations for taking this exam.

Professional Scrum Product Owner Outcomes
Delegates will leave with a comprehensive understanding of the practices and accountabilities of the product owner role, and will know how to get started in fulfilling it. Experienced product owners will leave with renewed confidence, and a collection of new techniques to try.