The Ultimate Product Owner: PSPO Prep Course (10 PDUs)

Define scrum as a lightweight, iterative framework for solving complex problems and delivering value through small increments, gathering feedback, and adapting with the product backlog, sprints, and continuous improvement.

Explore the scrum team, a cross-functional, self-managing unit with one scrum master, one product owner, and developers sharing a product goal, product backlog, and optimal size of ten or fewer.

Developers in a scrum team break features into sprint-sized pieces and create the sprint backlog, ensuring quality by following the definition of done and adjusting daily to the sprint goal.

The product owner maximizes value through product backlog management, defines the product goal, and prioritizes transparent backlog items to meet the goal and deliver value.

Master the Scrum Master role by promoting Scrum theory, facilitating ceremonies, coaching product owners, removing blockers, and enabling empirical planning with cross-functional teams to deliver valuable increments.

Explore the three Scrum artifacts—the product backlog, sprint backlog, and increment—and how they drive transparency through commitments to the product goal, sprint goal, and definition of done.

Own the product backlog as an emergent, ordered list with clear boundaries, known stakeholders, and defined users, guiding prioritization toward the product goal.

Understand how to create and manage the sprint backlog, define a two-week sprint goal, and use a Kanban board to deliver a real increment.

See how increments advance the product goal by delivering usable, tested features across sprints, guided by the definition of done and empiricism for transparent releases and sprint reviews.

Learn how Scrum events define the way of working, guiding sprint planning, daily scrums, reviews, and retrospectives to inspect and adapt the artifacts for continuous improvement.

Define short, fixed-length sprints that convert backlog ideas into value, counter Parkinson's law, and guide decisions with burndown, burnup, and cumulative flow diagrams.

Backlog refinement is an ongoing activity, not an official Scrum event. Developers size backlog items, add acceptance criteria and mockups, while the product owner clarifies trade-offs to meet the product goal.

Plan the sprint with a time-boxed eight-hour sprint planning session and ready backlog items. The product owner guides value and the team delivers a usable increment.

The daily scrum is a 15-minute event where developers inspect progress toward the sprint goal, keep the goal the same, and adapt backlog for the next 24 hours to plan.

Inspect the sprint increment in a real demonstration with the product owner and stakeholders, and adapt the product backlog based on feedback to progress toward the product goal.

Participate in the sprint retrospective to inspect team ways of working, identify root causes, and plan quick improvements by adding actions to the sprint backlog with owners.

Explore the Scrum theory of transparency, inspection, and adaptation, rooted in empiricism and lean thinking, to iteratively and incrementally deliver customer-valued increments. Inspect artifacts and adapt promptly to reduce risk.

Explore how the five Scrum values: commitment, openness, respect, courage, and focus on sprint work guide team behavior, with practices reinforcing them through transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

Apply a real-world step-by-step process to initiate projects, identify stakeholders, become the product expert, and manage backlogs, prioritization, estimation, delivery, release, and reprioritization with empirical results.

Develop the pet buddy mobile app, the Uber of pet stays, to match pet sitters with owners for short or long stays, sponsored by Samantha and delivered through Scrum increments.

Explore project initiation through a business case feasibility study that assesses need, stakeholders, current situation, root cause, risks, and solution options, culminating in a recommended action with milestones.

Explore the business model canvas and Lean Canvas to map customer segments, value proposition, revenue streams, channels, and costs, guiding how to deliver value and monetize.

Launch a minimum viable product within the lean startup approach to test the fewest features needed. Gather customer feedback and prioritize the next most valuable features to improve the product.

Perform make-or-buy analysis to decide between in-house development and buying, including ongoing costs and using a multi-criteria decision chart to rank vendors by source selection criteria.

Define bid documents such as RFQ, RFI, and RFP, link them to a clear SOW and scope baseline, and select suitable fixed or variable contract types.

Create a high-level project and team charter that authorizes funding and resources in agile initiatives, detailing sponsor and team roles, objectives, deliverables, milestones, and stakeholders.

Update the team charter to clarify the vision, values, roles, and ways of working, and define the definition of ready and done with acceptance criteria and product owner sign-off.

Define and track product and customer metrics to determine success and align with the product goal, backlog, and roadmap.

The team uses SMART goals to define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound targets for project metrics and success.

Define and measure product value with okrs and kpis, using written objectives and key results to set goals like increasing active users and sign-ups, and reducing churn.

Apply the balanced scorecard with financial performance, customer satisfaction, efficiency, and knowledge and innovation to guide key performance indicators, using net promoter score, ratings, and customer feedback to identify improvements.

Explore lean metrics from the Toyota production system, focusing on quality, first-pass yield, and delivery speed, while reducing cost by eliminating waste and downtime across defects, waiting, and overprocessing.

Explore financial measures for evaluating a product or project, focusing on net present value and internal rate of return, with a practical example of calculation.

Evaluate investment value by analyzing return on investment (roi), payback period, and benefit to cost ratios to prioritize features and projects. Use real world examples to compare costs and returns.

Calculate customer acquisition cost, understand its impact on profitability, and compare it to customer lifetime value to gauge long-term returns. Track customer churn to identify retention improvements.

Define a benefits management plan to set one product goal at a time, assign trackers, and specify metrics and update cadence for online visits, sales, and revenue targets.

Engage stakeholders and assemble a cross-functional agile team to gather user insights and deliver features. Emphasize face-to-face communication, T-shaped skills, and co-location to reduce task switching and boost team productivity.

Learn how to map stakeholders with an organizational breakdown structure, identify roles, and compile a stakeholder register with contact details, requirements, and influence.

Map stakeholders by impact over influence to tailor engagement for executives and frontline teams. Use a stakeholder engagement assessment matrix to specify current and desired states, guiding communication and involvement.

Identify team structure with the resource breakdown structure and apply a RACI matrix to define roles, responsibilities, and sign-offs for project items such as the project charter and test plan.

Select the right people and assign them to the right seats using a skill and will matrix to build resilient, high-performing product teams and easier execution.

Explore the Tuckman's ladder, a model of how teams form, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning during a project.

Use a co-located team space with visual management and information radiators, product backlog, roadmap, kanban board, burndown chart, aligned to t-shaped skills, risks, team charter, and vision, for sustainable velocity.

Promote co-location and face-to-face talks to maximize communication richness—relying on tone, body language, and words for fast feedback.

Explore how verbal and nonverbal cues—tone, inflection, and body language—shape meaning, from rising questions to commands, sincere smiles with eyes, open versus closed postures, and group dynamics.

Explore how co-location and osmosis accelerate learning through pairing and shared problem solving, with visible information radiators, reducing silos and enabling fast collaboration and fast answers.

Product owners can identify and leverage multiple power types to influence stakeholders without direct authority, including positional, informational, referent, situational, personal, relational, expert, reward, coercive, and persuasive power.

Learn seven negotiation techniques, including never saying yes to first offer, bracketing, higher authority gambits, never splitting the difference, pivot to non-monetary terms, BATNA, test deadlines, and positioning for acceptance.

Develop conflict management skills by choosing collaborative problem-solving with stakeholders, balancing power, time pressure, and relationship goals to achieve consensus.

Apply the assertive inquiry to express your own views and ask open-ended questions to understand others' perspectives, forming a complete picture with stakeholders and customers.

Learn how to become the expert in the product, owning the product goal, backlog, and roadmap, and applying design, technology, and business-area expertise to deliver value.

Learn how a product owner uses process mapping and swimlane flowcharts to visualize the customer journey, coordinate stakeholders, and communicate backlog changes from start to finish.

Use a customer journey map and personas to visualize the end-to-end experience, from onboarding and profile setup to booking, stay, and reviews, guided by customer comments and satisfaction insights.

Explore prototypes and storyboards to visualize the product early, using 2D/3D models, wireframes, and process maps to capture requirements and align the team and stakeholders.

Map value stream to distinguish value-added from non-value-added activities and cut waste by tracing steps from the customer order to develop, test, sign off, release, and deliver.

Map the value stream with a sipoc to identify supplier, input, process step, output, and customer, illustrated by a pet owner creating and receiving a profile.

Map how customer input flows through system classes and databases using a unified modeling language sequence diagram. Illustrate active time rectangles and end points across PetBuddy to guide feature updates.

Use context diagrams to visualize the product scope and information flows among actors, the PetBuddy mobile app, customer database, payment system, and calendar, clarifying inputs and outputs.

Define and use an interface table and data dictionary to capture detailed system interface requirements for features and pages, aligning prototypes, wireframes, and acceptance criteria.

Master the product backlog, where estimation and prioritization drive features toward the product goal. Deliver usable increments and vertical slices with measures for stakeholder visibility and customer value.

Define product value from the customer perspective using personas and the jobs-to-be-done framework. Translate needs, feedback, and market insights into backlog features and compliance requirements.

Benchmark against similar organizations to identify gaps and inspire feature ideas for your backlog. Map current processes, analyze data, and plan improvements toward the desired future state.

Explore how design thinking's double diamond guides discovery by diverging to brainstorm problems, converging to define root causes, then diverging again to craft a few solutions that become backlog features.

Identify the eight wastes from lean and the Toyota system, including defects, overproduction, waiting, transport, inventory, motion, and excessive processing, to increase value for customers.

Use surveys to gather broad input from stakeholders and users, leverage focus groups to test ideas with real customers, and observe users to uncover root requirements and refine wireframes.

Master facilitation to guide groups to decisions and action items, ensuring inclusive participation, assertive inquiry, and clear follow-up of assigned actions.

Leverage the nominal group technique to generate ideas anonymously, group them with affinity diagrams, vote privately from 1 to 5, and tally to select top backlog ideas.

Learn to use open and closed questions to drive feature ideation during facilitation, gathering detailed insights with open questions and quick confirmations with closed questions.

Explore how product owners use design for x, rooted in Six Sigma, to shape features that balance ease of use, simplicity, and assembly while serving customer goals.

Communicate the vision through a vision on a page and a product roadmap that map features to metrics and a single product goal, guided by okrs and measurable milestones.

Explore estimation and ranges in backlog prioritization, from rough order of magnitude to bottom-up estimates, using top-down and bottom-up methods as product owners refine effort, cost, and value.

Use t-shirt sizing to estimate epics, deliverables, and releases with a relative approach, and define sizes from small to extra large using sprints and weeks.

Explore estimating techniques for features and user stories, including analogous, parametric, three-point, beta/pert, and bottom-up methods. Choose the best fit for real-world projects and apply velocity with care.

Explore agile estimation techniques such as planning poker, wideband delphi, and relative sizing using Fibonacci numbers to reach consensus. Learn fist of five and affinity estimating to refine sprint planning.

Prioritize backlog items from highest to lowest value using feature ideas, estimates, and a definition of ready to deliver value toward the product goal, while avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.

Apply MoSCoW prioritization with must have, should have, could have, and will not have, plus cost to benefit analysis to rank features by value and effort for agile product owners.

Rank features using DFV framework—desirability, feasibility, viability—within SAFe, and apply multi-voting methods like monopoly money, dots, and 100-point votes to prioritize, achieving the innovation suite when all three are high.

Explore the cost of delay by computing CD3 from expected profit in weeks divided by delivery duration, and compare with the weighted shortest job first approach.

Apply Kano analysis to classify features as basic quality, satisfiers, or delighters, and see how AI and electric windows shift from delighters to must-haves across the product life cycle.

Use multi-criteria decision charts to prioritize features when stakeholders disagree, ranking options by effort over value and customer satisfaction, ease of use, marketing usefulness, cost, and resources, aligned with objectives.

Master scheduling techniques for product roadmaps with buffers in estimates and clear stakeholder timelines. Identify the critical path—the longest sequence of dependent tasks with zero slack—and its effect on delivery.

Explore how leads and lags optimize project schedules by bringing activities forward or delaying them, with examples from photo editing and house construction.

Learn the precedence diagramming method (PDM) for building a project schedule and product roadmap, detailing finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish relationships with practical examples.

Master schedule compression techniques like crashing and fast tracking to shorten timelines without shrinking scope. Visualize the product roadmap with Gantt charts or precedence diagrams and balance resources and risk.

Decompose the sprint backlog by breaking epics and features from the product backlog into smaller user stories with acceptance criteria and estimates for delivery within a sprint.

Decompose projects by a scope statement and deliverables, then break work with a work breakdown structure, product breakdown structure, and agile items like epics, user stories, and releases to customers.

Organize ideas with an affinity diagram, grouping them into buckets, epics, and releases, then apply invest criteria (independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, testable) for effective user stories and sprint planning.

Explore how the three Cs—card, user story, and confirmation—guide the three amigos (customer, developers, testers) through face-to-face conversations to define requirements, acceptance criteria, and definition of done.

Learn to define acceptance criteria for user stories and deliverables with simple process steps, use cases, feature-driven development, and behavior-driven development (given–when–then) for agile, waterfall, or hybrid projects.

Learn how a requirements traceability matrix helps track requirements, owners, scope, tests, and acceptance criteria, with a work breakdown structure dictionary in a project management information system.