The Product Owner Role (1 day)

Product Owner – Requirements and Release Planning with Scrum (1 day course)

Background

In Scrum the Product Owner role is probably the most difficult role to perform successfully. The Product Owner steers the overall Scrum project to deliver a return on investment and bridges the gap between end customers/stakeholders and development. The Product Owner combines the traditional project and product manager roles in one person.

Who Should Attend

This course is intended for those who would play the role of, or would directly support, the Product Owner on a Scrum project. It assumes a thorough working knowledge of agile and scrum and is designed for those who have attended the ‘Team Primer in Agile and Scrum’ course. Typical participants would be Product Managers, Business Analysts, Project Managers/leads and project support personnel who will benefit from an understanding of how to define/refine requirements and plan releases in Agile/Scrum.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

• Leverage Scrum to optimise value creation and customer satisfaction
• Interact with customer/end user stakeholders to understand their needs and define an effective product backlog with prioritised user stories/requirements
• Direct and work with the Scrum team in the creation of a realistic release plan
• Steer the Scrum team by providing feedback and support for the evolving software system to maximise productivity and business value

Topics Covered

1. Review of Scrum Process and Roles
   • Scrum lifecycle and Team roles
   • Product owner role in the four Scrum meetings
   • Product Owner Characteristics and typical responsibilities
2. Requirements development in Scrum
   • Defining your stakeholders and understanding their needs
   • The Product Vision
   • Software Overproduction
   • From features to user stories – techniques for splitting requirements
   • The INVEST criteria for user stories
   • Creating and refining the Product Backlog
   • User stories and acceptance criteria with examples
   • Exercise: defining and refining user stories using a workshop approach
   • Prioritisation of user stories and other elements of the product backlog
   • techniques with exercises
   • Product and Release scope
3. Release Planning and Management
   • Working with customer stakeholders to build agreements
   • Release Management Strategies
   • Estimation
   • The need for estimation with incremental development
   • Estimation for user stories: story points
   • Exercise: planning poker for story points
   • Additional estimation options
   • Ideal days
   • Task estimation
   • Project velocity and sustainable development
   • Creating the Release Plan
   • Exercise: create a release plan
   • Tracking/reporting Project Progress and predicting delivery date/scope
   • Dealing with changes
4. Working with the Scrum team in Sprints
   • Formulating Sprint Goals
   • Supporting Sprint Planning
   • Daily standups, Sprint Demo/Review and Retrospectives
   • Exercise: Interpreting the Sprint Progress – taskboards and burndown charts
5. Working with distributed teams
   • Multi-team Planning and Coordination
6. Pitfalls and how to avoid them