Agile for Product Owners

Gain a concrete understanding of Agile and how it applies to the Product Owner role.

This Agile for Product Owners training course will provide the knowledge to understand and apply the principles of agile. At the end of the course, participants will be able to effectively plan, prioritize, and manage a product roadmap to deliver business value, understand the role of the Product Owner and the development team within an iterative process, and gain the skills necessary to become an agile leader to drive your organization to the next level.

You will learn how to:

• Become an influential change agent
• Map your value streams
• Identifying high performance in teams and organizations
• Apply Agile project planning principles like user roles and personas
• Develop an Agile Backlog
• Write acceptance criteria and use them for story decomposition
• Use various prioritization approaches and risk management approaches
• Plan sprints using Poker Planning and Affinity Estimation
• How to scale agile using Scrum of Scrums, SAFe and LeSS

Professionals who may benefit include:

• Product Owners
• Product Managers
• Team Leadership
• Project Managers

Course ouline

Part 1: The Necessity for Change

Gain an overall understanding of why effective focus on dealing with change is important.

1. VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity
2. Leading Change – Your role as a change agent
3. The Cynefin Model of Complexity – Urgency for change
4. Deming's 14 Points
5. Agile and Waterfall comparison

Part 2: Mindset and Manifesto

Learn why mindset change is needed and how the Agile Manifesto is the shift needed.

1. How an Agile transformation starts with a mindset change
2. Explaining the Agile Values
3. The 3 focus areas represented by the Agile Principles

Part 3: Agile Frameworks

Where Lean and Kanban fit in the Agile spectrum which leads to the Scrum framework and XP practices.

1. Principles of Lean and the 8 wastes of software development
2. Mapping your Value Stream
3. Key ideas in Kanban

Part 4: Team Concepts

Identifying high performance in teams and different kinds of organizational teams, including distributed ones.

1. What are the characteristics of high performance?
2. Five kinds of organizational teams
3. Distributed teams and challenges with distribution

Part 5: Scrum and Its Roles

Learn where Scrum came from and the key roles on a Scrum team.

1. Agile/Scrum history and the essence of Scrum
2. The Scrum framework
3. The Stakeholder/Customer
4. Scrum Master’s key responsibilities
5. The Development team’s responsibilities
6. The role of QA
7. The Management role
8. What is a Product Owner and the PO Role/Challenges?
9. Agile Leadership

Part 6: Agile Project Planning

Understanding the Agile planning approach, key ways to convey project vision, and the use of user roles and personas.

1. The Levels of Agile Planning
2. Elevator Pitches, Project Charters, Themes, and Roadmaps

1. User Roles and Personas

Understanding the use of stories and approaches to defining story maps and story splitting.

1. Critical documentation concepts
2. Product and Sprint Backlogs
3. User Stories and Story Patterns
4. Epics and their breakdown
5. Story “Smells”
6. Story Mapping and Splitting

Part 8: Acceptance Criteria and Prioritization

Writing good acceptance criteria and using them for story decomposition. Understanding technical stories and technical debt in support of Development teams. Using various prioritization approaches and risk management approaches.

1. Why Acceptance Criteria are important and writing them.
2. Technical Stories and Technical Debt
3. Prioritization approaches and Cost of Delay considerations
4. Why projects go beyond their reasonable end
5. Risk Management techniques

Part 9: Estimation

How traditional estimation can go wrong and the relative estimation approach used in Agile, including estimation approaches such as Poker Planning and Affinity Estimation. How story estimation can lead to release planning.

1. What are the challenges with traditional estimation?
2. Agile’s relative estimation approach
3. Poker Planning
4. Affinity Estimation
5. Agile Release Planning

Part 10: Sprint Execution

The Product Owner roles in Sprint Planning, Daily Meetings, Sprint Reviews, and the Sprint Retrospective.

1. Sprint planning and story refinement
2. Sprint execution: the daily meeting and XP practices
3. Basic Sprint metrics tools
4. Metrics implementation advice
5. Sprint Review for product improvement and evolution
6. Sprint Retrospective for team/process improvement and evolution

Part 11: Agile Scaling Methods

A look at three key scaling approaches: Scrum of Scrums, SAFe, and LeSS.

1. Basic Scrum scaling with Scrum of Scrums
2. Comprehensive scaling using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
3. Large Scale Scrum as a scaling approach