Passionate Product Leadership A Certified Scrum Product Owner course, September 16-17 2021

About this event

Stop! Don’t bother taking this course if your only concern is learning Scrum and mastering the product ownership role. Because:

This is not just a product ownership class

This product thinking, leadership, and process workshop combines contemporary tech product thinking with agile development and Scrum.

This in-person workshop is about product thinking and how to apply it in your organization.

A strong product-centric approach places emphasis on customers and users and creating successful outcomes and, ultimately, a big impact on your business. All that sounds good, maybe obvious, right? But, in your organization you may be focused more on happy business stakeholders and on-time delivery than successful products. It’s not that those things aren’t important. It’s just that focusing mostly on those things can distract you and your team from really focusing on the outcomes that benefit your organization.

One of the first things you’ll learn is that, while “product owner” may be a Scrum role, product ownership is a whole team responsibility. If you’re a product owner or product manager you likely already know that you’ll be the most successful if you’re collaborating effectively with your whole team, and if your whole team understands product thinking.

This workshop will help you build a deeper understanding of product thinking and the ways of working that support it. We’ll build on agile principles and Scrum practice and add back the product thinking you don’t get with agile development alone. You’ll leave with a mindset that will help you help others in your organization, along with the practices that’ll help you do your job on a daily basis.

21st century tech product development concepts and practice

You may have noticed that technology products are different today than they were 10 or 20 years ago. They work more like services. They continuously evolve and improve. And, not surprisingly, the way we design and build them has evolved and improved. In this workshop we’ll talk about approaches we layer on top of agile development and the Scrum framework. Things like:

Lean Startup and Lean UX practice
Design Thinking
Dual-Track Development
User Stories and Story Mapping

Who this course is for

Not just for product managers and owners

While one person in a team may hold a product manager or product ownership role, it takes a cross-functional team with strong product thinking to design and build the product. That’s why this class isn’t just for product owners.

If you’re a product manager or product owner, this workshop is for you.
One thing you likely already know is that best product decisions balance business, user experience and technology concerns. If you’re a UX practitioner or senior engineer, this workshop is for you.
If you’re a Scrum master or agile coach, have you seen your organization struggle to apply product thinking using a Scrum and agile approach? If you’d like to better understand how to help your organization become a strong product organization, this workshop is for you.
If you’re a business stakeholder, manager, or leader in your organization, do you understand how product thinking changes the way you’ll need to work with teams? If you’d like to better understand how to motivate teams and keep them focused on successful outcomes while being self-directed, this workshop is for you.

Learning outcomes for this course

You’ll learn how these contemporary practices knit together in a holistic approach to product development. You’ll learn how to:

Evaluate how product-centric your process is today
Organize product teams around your products and product areas
Understand the critical product leadership roles on a product team
Scale product teams within large complex organizations
Build shared understanding of your current products using simple proto-personas and journey maps
Identify good product metrics
Write useful OKRs that help your team focus prioritization and planning
Organize product roadmaps and strategic plans around business outcomes
Drive product discovery work using hypotheses and tests
Create successful product release strategies that emphasize earning and learning with each release
Create successful development strategies that emphasize predictability and quality
Work with your team to help them tactically plan and manage each sprint
Integrate continuous discovery and delivery in dual-track development

Prerequisites

Past attendance in an agile development course, certified Scrum Master course, or past experience working within an agile development team is strongly recommended.