Product Owner
(Non-IT) Agile Product Owner (PO)
What is a Product Owner?
A product owner (PO) is a key role in the Agile value delivery. The PO owns and is responsible for the value delivery to the user or customers, and is a key role in succeeding between translating the needs from the customers, users and stakeholders to the developers who are building the product. The PO has the means and connections to work in a complex, changing environment, and leads product development in an agile, iterative way.
A product owner has tools to discover the customer needs, guide the product development with evidence and validation, prioritise carefully what needs to be built and which features can be cut out.
Some POs are owners of an existing product, thus maintaining and updating the product with continuous improvement. Others POs are focused on building new products from scratch, engaging in innovation, design and prototyping, all the way to releasing the product or its parts to the users. With PO skills you can lead any kind of product development.
A PO is…
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A professional who can lead product vision, strategy, define the product roadmap, understands the features and updates for the product
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Able and credible to communicate with stakeholders and sponsors.
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Builds, follows and understands the metrics and KPIs of their product (not just process metrics, but impact metrics, user metrics, experience metrics, and lead times/bottlenecks).
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Makes evidence based decisions on what features to develop or update next, and prioritises the development and maintenance of the product in a timely, structured and organized manner.
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Understands the lifecycle of a product and is able to define what to develop as new features, what to maintain, what to improve, and what to retire regarding their product.
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A skilled role in the Agile team, capable of translating all the requirements clearly to the team. Then the PO can help the team turn the requirements into sprint plans and work as a sounding board when making decisions on delivering the actual product.
Why should you attend the Product Owner training program?
- If you have experienced that the IT-language doesn’t land, we translate agile into insights and skills for non-software people.
- Our 4-week training program really changes the mindset and grounds the skillset, compared to a 2-day PO class that many others are offering.
- We build on social learning, learning together in a team, and connecting the theory to a hypothetical project is fun.
- We use Agile to learn Agile. We learn in modules, and use feedback and demos to look at what participant teams have done.
- We aren’t afraid to be challenged, and we are not Agile fundamentalists. We understand the dynamics and hierarchies in traditional companies. We understand that everything doesn’t go as ideally described in the Scrum guide.
- We keep a high professional standard and teach our classes to understand the ideal Agile setting and the expectations on the PO role, but be realistic about the reality around the organisational enablement of the PO role.
- Understand the agile mindset in product development
- Have a clear view on the Product Owner role and accountabilities
- Be able to define the vision of your product
- Create and update a release plan and a product roadmap for your product
- Have tools to engage with your stakeholder groups.
- Setup and follow your product performance metrics
- Define the moments that matter for your product’s users and run user experiments and use discovery to identify which updates are needed.
- Have been introduced into how Product teams can do discovery and validation to find evidence of what users or customers really appreciate, want or are willing to pay for.
- Define the features to update and prioritise the product feature development
- Break down larger updates into smaller bits of improvements and development
- Lead product development work through a prioritised backlog
- Learn to estimate the work and effort related to the development work of your product
- Break down larger updates into smaller bits of improvements and development
- Have ideas on how to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders
Who is the Product Owner training program for?
- People service owners / process owners
- Leading the work of agile HR teams (responsible for prioritisation)
- Professionals who are accountable for one larger HR entity (i.e. “recruitment” or “employee survey”)
- A HR manager in smaller companies - planning and prioritising everything
- HR/IS development managers leading the development efforts on the tech side.
- Product managers, process managers with a customer facing team
- Service managers with teams who are combining customer service with product development work.
- Internal process owners from marketing, sales, communications, quality, compliance, maintenance, legal.
- Development managers and professionals responsible for developing internal or external products, services, concepts, processes.
- Strategy and change leaders who want to approach change as an incremental, stepwise and prioritised process instead of a “one size fits all - rollout”.
What does the Product Owner training program contain?
- This is a fully virtual training program.
- We are learning through four modules. In each module we focus on a consecutive part of the PO’s work, to build a holistic picture and to exercise it hands on. Before Module 1, participants do some pre-work (reading articles and watching videos)
- We’re combining several learning techniques. This is why our training programs have been very influential. You’ll walk away having tried the Agile PO methods and tools on a hypothetical product with your small team.
- You’ll demo your exercises and get a lot of feedback on them.
Module 1: Understanding your users & customers
Module 2: Building your product backlog
Module 3: Refining your product backlog
Module 4: Product Roadmap and stakeholder collaboration
Module 1: Understanding your users & customers
Background to Agile product development (recap)
Setting a product vision
Understanding user experience
Using tools from the design thinking toolkit to discover customer needs
Home work: Application exercise on your own example product (in small group)
Using tools from the design thinking toolkit to discover customer needs
Home work: Application exercise on your own example product (in small group)
Module 2: Building your product backlog
Review of the groups’ example products, feedback discussions and learning from doing.
Building a product backlog with features
Prioritising your product backlog/features with different prioritisation methods
Home work: Application exercise on your own example product (in small group)
Module 3: Refining your product backlog
Review of the groups’ example products, feedback discussions and learning from doing.
Estimation of a backlog’s workload
#Noestimates as method
Velocity and capacity
Forecasting the progress through metrics
Continuous refinement of the product backlog
Why the PULL based way of working in the team is important for you as a PO
Home work: Application exercise on your own example product (in small group)
Module 4: Product Roadmap and stakeholder collaboration
Defining and following product metrics
Review of the groups’ example products, feedback discussions and learning from doing.
Building and maintaining a product roadmap
Stakeholder collaboration and the planning of it
Managing change on the roadmap
Conclusions: My role as a Product Owner - insights, learnings and next steps
Certificate & Badges
The participants are awarded a “Product Owner – Certification by Agile HR Community” certificate and e-badge for
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90% participation in the live virtual classes
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Participation in all of the small group’s application work, where your group has done promptly the required exercises around the groups’s example project.
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Participated in offering feedback to the other teams on their application.
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Submitting your group’s product application to the trainer.
Schedules and Price
- 1600 EUR/person + applicable VAT for one person
- 1440 EUR/person (-10%) + applicable VAT for two persons on the same program ***
- 1360 EUR/person (-15%) + applicable VAT for three or more persons on the same program ***
***Must be booked at the same time under the same invoice.
See training calendar for public training program scheduling.
Ask for pricing for more people, or tailored in-house deliveries
