Training: Product Owner Toolkit

Duration and language:

Onsite training - 14h - 2 days each 7 hours (including breaks).

Online training - 15h - 3 days each 5 hours (including breaks). Online training schedule:

• 09:00 - 11:00 CET online session,
• 11:00 - 12:00 CET break,
• 12:00 - 14:00 CET online session,

Training is provided in English. A Polish version is also available.

Target group:

The training is intended for:

• Product Owners, product managers,
• business and system analysts, solution architects,
• change agents, internal trainers, Scrum Masters,
• agile coaches, Agile consultants,
• specialists, members of operational teams,
• department/team leaders and managers.

Those who want to grow the organization in the spirit of Agile and Lean.

Training preconditions:

Product Owner Toolkit training is intended for people with at least one year of experience in Scrum or who have already participated in an introductory course. Prior participation in Scrum Essentials, Applying Professional Scrum, Professional Scrum Product Owner training is a good introduction, but it is not mandatory.

For online training, it is required to be computer literate and meet technical requirements: https://valkir.pl/en/online-training/.

Price includes:

• Preparation and training performed by an expert, an experienced Agile and Lean consultant.
• Effective training in a small group - on average 6-12 people.
• Training materials, requisites and a certificate of training completion issued by Valkir Academy.
• Lunch and catering (drinks and snacks). Not applicable to online training.
• Trainer’s travel and expenses (T&E). Not applicable to online training.

Certification:

The price of the authorial training includes certificates of training completion issued by Valkir Academy (in English). If you want to obtain Scrum.org certification, we invite you to our accredited Applying Professional Scrum, Professional Scrum Product Owner training, or to purchase a voucher (additional fee) for the PSPO I assessment.

Training description:

What is the Product Ownerów Toolkit training?

Both novice Product Owners and those with several years of experience need to improve their skills. Nothing is as conducive to development as a safe space to experiment. This authorial program has been prepared for people who build their toolbox, but remember that tools without appropriate stances and behavior can be counterproductive.

If it is important for you to maximize the value delivered by the solution, product or service which vision you steer, you should understand what stances to embody depending on the context of the situation. To address this aspect, the training begins with a solid discussion of stances and anti-stances, which will allow you to build a kind of foundation on which various practical tools will be presented.

Workshop formula will help you discuss the challenges and effectively avoid dead ends that can often lead a Product Owner into the trap of adoring his/her solution. You will gain knowledge, learn practical tools, strengthen the image of a person who can adjust tools to the appropriate situation, balancing between responding to the needs of stakeholders, customers, users and the capacity and economic capabilities of your environment.

Who is behind this?

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are considered to be Scrum’s fathers, although the approach itself is based on self-organizing teams, popularized by the famous publication “The New New Product Development Game” written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1986.

Over 300 Scrum.org trainers around the world every day support the development of management by organizing practical training, learning through games, workshops and effective practices.

Training agenda:

1. Stances and anti-stances of a Product Owner
   • The most common PO dysfunctions and anti-stances.
   • Discussion related to the participants’ experiences, consequences for the organization.
   • Recommended stances based on Scrum.org and experiences from Agile transformation.
   • When and how to consciously use the right stances depending on the situation and context?
    
2. Key competence areas
   • Overview of preconditions such as: analytical skills, storytelling, empathy, visualization.
   • Competence in stakeholder management and effective communication.
   • Market analysis, business analysis.
    
3. Product Discovery essence
   • Methods for defining the product vision using selected popular techniques such as Product Box, Product Canvas, Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas.
   • Methods of defining the problem hypothesis, quantitative and qualitative research.
   • Development of the target group based on (Proto)Persona, Empathy Map, Affinity Mapping.
   • Popular patterns and antipatterns regarding initial actions for the target group need research.
    
4. Agile product roadmap
   • What are product roadmaps and why are they created, based on the GO Product Roadmap.
   • Defining the Product Goal and its impact on the Sprint Goal.
   • Explanation of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept and methods of its validation.
   • An overview of metrics in terms of Innovation Accounting, Pivot or Persevere concept.
    
5. Stakeholder expectation management
   • Defining requirements using User Story and INVEST technique. Brainstorming: What to look for when writing user stories.
   • Methods of estimating value, complexity and profitability.
   • Plan, budget and product release in a complex environment.
   • Agile contracts - what kind of contracts to conclude in an Agile world? How to approach scoping, time and costs in an Agile approach?
    
6. Product Backlog continuous refinement
   • How to shape the Product Backlog using the User Story Mapping technique? How to define a process and its users/actors?
   • Impact Mapping as a technique of visualizing assumptions and determining the appropriate activities that bring closer the achievement of the Product Goal.
   • User Story Maps and Impact Maps workshops for a defined case study.
   • Financial and non-financial techniques for prioritizing PBIs.
    
7. Effective, transparent processes and events
   • Schemes and recipes for achieving the goal of Scrum events and processes.
   • Moderating and facilitating meetings related to assessing needs,verifying hypotheses, changing requirements and testability of the solution.
   • What tools can help you run effective Scrum events?
   • Basics of Agile at scale: Scrum with multiple teams.
    
8. Measures, value and transparency
   • Why measure at all? What is the difference between facts and opinions? How much does measuring cost?
   • Discussion of areas that can be measured, pitfalls and dead ends of measurement.
   • Creating hypotheses and validating experiments for better decision making.
   • Discussion: What is tech debt and how to take it into account during product development?
    
9. Training summary

Training goals:

What are the challenges we address?

• What stances should a Product Owner embody and which should he/she avoid?
• What tools should be used to plan short and long-term product development?
• How can requirements engineering techniques improve stakeholder expectations management?
• What practices should be used to improve Sprint Review and Product Backlog Refinement?
• How to maximize the value of teamwork in conditions of extreme uncertainty and change?
• How to shorten the time from idea to market-verified user needs
• What metrics can I use to make decisions for business strategy
• How to avoid sticking to patterns and choose tools for the particular situation?

Jakie korzyści otrzymujesz?

The training allows participants to better understand their organization, the challenges it faces and more effectively steer its growth. It contains theoretical knowledge and practical methods taken from the idea of product thinking, entrepreneurship, innovation, facilitation, usability, business analysis, stakeholder management and many other areas.

As a result of this training, participants from different areas of the organization will:

• know and understand aspects needed to effectively stimulate organization growth and teams towards agility,
• acquire skills necessary to apply mentioned methods in practice,
• understand how and why new methods can positively affect their work.

Whenever possible, topics presented during the training are explained through a game/exercise that allows to apply the learned practice or principle in the business context. Exercise or game usually ends with a debrief and discussion on how to adapt the presented practices to the participants’ context.