Scrum Product Owner

Explore the course structure, learning objectives, and how to use the courseware and course book. Prepare effectively for the certification exam and map your path to success.

Print a copy of the courseware and follow along to use the course's consistent conventions—chapter learning objectives, key terms, concepts to know, and the iconography used to illustrate examples.

Engage with quizzes and exercises to confirm your understanding of learning objectives and reinforce key Scrum concepts, skills, and readiness for the certification exam.

Examine scrum certification exams, featuring objective, multiple-choice tests that assess how you apply scrum practices. Know the range of questions and durations, from 75–140 questions and 90–180 minutes, online proctored.

Explore key terms such as adaptation, the Agile Manifesto, information radiators, inspection, portfolios, programs, projects, scrum, a scrum guidance body, time boxing, transparency, and waterfall.

Explore how project management acts as a framework to allocate time, resources, and people to deliver valuable products. Coordinate stakeholders, teams, artifacts, and deliverables to customers.

The lecture explains the shift from traditional waterfall to agile, highlighting the agile manifesto's emphasis on individuals, collaboration, working software, and responding to change over heavy documentation and fixed contracts.

Explore agile methodologies—Lean, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Test-Driven Development, Adaptive Software Development, Unified Process, and Domain-Driven Design—and see how Scrum leverages these techniques.

Employ empirical process control to use tangible results as feedback for evolving solutions that meet customer needs. Self-organize the team to deliver high-value outcomes through time-boxed iterations.

Learn that self-organization in scrum empowers teams to own solutions, remove roadblocks, and improve outcomes through servant leadership, buy-in, and space for innovation.

Maintain a prioritized product backlog to adapt to changing customer needs, risks, and dependencies, continually reordering work to maximize business value and deliver highest-value features first.

Iterative development delivers higher value early by breaking work into sprints, re-prioritizing based on changing requirements and risks, and continuously managing risks to maximize customer value.

Explore the core scrum processes, organized into five groups: initiation, planning and estimation, implementation, review in retrospect, and release—highlighting all eighteen activities.

Use a scrum of scrums to align with other teams in a program, conduct sprint review with the product owner and stakeholders, and perform sprint retrospective to improve team processes.

Explore the core of scrum, including what it is, its benefits, and how to scale it, along with the key principles and the 18 processes associated with it.

Discover the key roles, responsibilities, and authorities in scrum, including the product owner's duties and the specific responsibilities of the scrum master and scrum team within the project flow.

Define the key scrum roles—the scrum master, product owner, and scrum team—and introduce the scrum guidance body, outlining reusable structures for conducting successful scrum projects.

Define the product owner's role and capabilities to support the scrum team's work, outlining responsibilities, authorities, and interactions with other roles within the project.

Learn how the scrum master supports the product owner by coordinating sprint activities and delivering key deliverables that advance the product owner's objectives.

Identify the scrum master role as a servant leader who facilitates the scrum team and stakeholders, mentors, and removes roadblocks to optimize value and performance.

Coach and teach Scrum practices to help the team maximize value, challenge the team when needed, protect them from interruptions and impediments within the sprint, and prioritize product backlog items.

Explore the scrum team's role in a scrum project, delivering user stories through self-organisation and task execution to empower and support them in producing effective solutions.

Form a cross-functional scrum team that delivers whole, potentially shippable solutions each sprint by combining requirements solicitation and validation with design, development, testing, and documentation.

The scrum team self organizes to commit to user stories and estimate tasks, while the product owner clarifies which stories to tackle and the team collaborates to remove roadblocks.

Identify and engage stakeholders including customers, users, sponsors, and vendors, collaborate with the scrum master on a communications plan, and elicit and prioritize product backlog requirements for delivery visibility.

Outline roles and responsibilities in scrum, highlighting product owner's role in defining requirements and prioritized product backlog, with support from the scrum master and team, collaborating with customers and vendors.

Learn essential terms including business case, epic, gap analyses, JAD sessions, Kano analysis, sprint length, minimum marketable features, personas, prioritized product backlogs, user stories, and release plans.

Define a clear project vision with customers and stakeholders to establish shared goals. Use it to guide teamwork, track performance, and align features with user needs and a revenue model.

Create the project vision with customers and stakeholders by aligning the business case, mission, and desired end state, using a vision meeting, JAD sessions, and swat and gap analyses.

The project vision meeting engages customers, users, and stakeholders to define the business context, success metrics, and requirements, with the product owner championing stakeholder expectations in scrum.

Use gap analysis to compare current performance with the desired end state, identify the gap in processes and capabilities, and determine the needed changes before proposing solutions.

Create a simple project vision that aligns stakeholders on shared goals, minimizes pre-work, and guides roadmaps to deliver high value despite changing requirements.

Create and maintain a dynamic, prioritized product backlog that captures epics, user stories, risks, and changes to reflect customer needs, with the product owner leading workshops and prioritization efforts.

Explain epic as a big story and break it into user stories, then create personas to show value and challenges for a traveler’s expense management scenario.

Turn epics into detailed user stories in meetings and workshops, building a prioritized product backlog by capturing who uses the system, what it does, and why it matters to cost.

define done and establish acceptance criteria to objectively test, document, and integrate each user story, while the product owner and scrum master protect the sprint.

Learn how estimates, as predictions with uncertainty, drive sprint commitments; as teams gain familiarity, estimate ranges tighten, and early projects with limited visibility require cautious commitments.

Explore the product backlog as a living list of needs, including user stories, nonfunctional requirements, and risks, and see how the product owner groom and prioritize it for sprint planning.

Apply the one hundred point method, a multi voting technique by Leffingwell and Widick (2003), where each user allocates 100 points across stories to drive initial prioritization.

Learn Kano analysis for strategic planning by prioritizing features as exciting, performance, dissatisfiers, and indifferent types, and watch how value shifts through a product lifecycle, illustrated with an 8-track player.

Define the product owner's responsibilities to maximize business value by securing sponsor funding, collaborating with customers and users, and prioritizing the product backlog of user stories for sprint reviews.

Define the product owner's role with customers to plan and manage a release plan across sprints, aligning shippable deliverables with minimum functionality and minimum marketable features for production releases.

Lead release planning meetings with the scrum team, product owner, sponsors, and users to define minimum marketable features and delivery readiness, guiding continuous or phased deployment and customer value realization.

Align stakeholders on a shared, generic project vision and manage a backlog by eliciting requirements, estimating effort for epics and user stories, and aligning with release plans to deliver value.

Explore how scrum practices drive quality and quality assurance, address requests for change, and use the product backlog to identify risks and mitigation activities while supporting changing requirements.

Explore key terms for the Scrum product owner chapter, including business case, criteria, issues, analyses, DDCA, risk concepts, burn down charts, and quality.

Define and measure quality using the definition of done and acceptance criteria to drive quality metrics and ensure deliverables align with business objectives.

Define an overarching definition of done for all user stories, including unit testing, code reviews, documentation, and a successful sprint preview, to measure acceptance and handover in scrum.

Explore how changes are requested and assessed for risk, cost, and value. Learn how to decide on approval and integrate changes into the prioritized product backlog.

Integrate changes into the prioritized product backlog during backlog creation and grooming, update prioritization, honor acceptance criteria, and protect the sprint by deferring major changes to the next sprint.

Identify and assess risks, differentiate them from issues, and manage risk mitigation activities while integrating them into the prioritized product backlog.

Recognize that risk is not inherently bad; set the organization's risk tolerance to balance rewards with its mission. Align scrum practices with risk appetite across risk-averse, risk-neutral, and risk-seeking contexts.

Mitigate risks by lessening them and tracking progress with a risk burn down chart. The product owner emphasizes business value while the scrum master coordinates risk responses and stakeholder communication.

Learn how the sprint planning meeting lets the product owner request user stories and the team commit to a sprint, while backlog grooming and sprint review decisions shape deliverables.

Identify key terms in this chapter, including daily stand up, daily scrum, planning poker, scrum board, sprint burn down charts, sprint review meetings, story points, tasks, and user stories.

Explore the product owner's role in sprint planning, negotiating with the team to select user stories for a sprint, and coordinating efforts to align with business needs.

conduct sprint planning with the product owner and scrum team to select backlog items, discuss user stories, and estimate tasks within a timeboxed sprint.

planning poker helps scrum teams estimate user story effort with cards, while the product owner provides business value and the scrum master facilitates consensus for sprint readiness.

Explore diverse estimation techniques for Scrum product owners, including wideband Delphi, affinity estimations, and story point ranges, to assess effort levels and project baselines with confidence.

Learn to estimate user stories using relative criteria and story points, and explore ideal time to gauge effort and manage team workload effectively.

A sprint burn down chart helps the team track remaining work against the sprint timeline, showing progress over the 19 working days before the sprint review.

Measure velocity—the number of user stories completed in a sprint—to guide release planning and estimate minimum marketable features. Improve processes and teamwork to deliver a high quality product.

Track sprint progress by linking user stories to overall business value and measurable metrics like revenue, profit, market share, and reduced costs, while monitoring velocity via story points.

Learn how co-located teams maximize collaboration in a war room, using a scrum board, burndown chart, and cross-functional skills to plan and deliver user stories.

Explore stand-up activities and collaboration in a war room that foster self-organization, motivation, and a results-only culture, with transparency through burn-down charts and scrum boards.

Groom and review the product backlog with stakeholders, the scrum master, and the team to confirm user stories, acceptance criteria, and prioritize changes and risks for the next sprint.

Examine the product owner's role during the sprint review and verify that the deliverables meet the acceptance criteria, confirming they are ready for handover.

Define potentially shippable sprint deliverables as fully tested and documented features ready for deployment, and determine with customers when to package and release them.

Explore the product owner's responsibilities across a sprint, from sprint planning and daily activities to backlog grooming, deliverable acceptance at sprint review, and handoff to customers.