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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.