A Product Owner embodies the vision for their product, has the final say over product content, and is accountable for the value generated by the product. From this perspective the Product Owner is the CEO of an autonomous corporation comprising one or more Scrum Teams.

This course will immerse you in the vision that Scrum holds for the Product Owner role, taking its foundations from Scrum principles. The Product Owner role is not just a re-tread Product Manager: he or she specifies tests, and builds working prototypes, may specify wireframes and navigation trees. The Product Owner must ensure that the team understands each imminent product increment to the point of having an Enabling Specification— otherwise, the team gets to make it visible that the specs are inadequate and “go to the beach.” The Product Owner is held accountable for value from the product. Great Product Owners can realize immense satisfaction from guiding a product to add value to some constituency, and to watch their teams respond to their inspirational leadership.

We will cover both the Product Owner’s interactions with stakeholders such as the market and end users, and also with the Development Team. There is a special emphasis on value stream thinking and on tools such as decision structure matrices for managing the flow of value to the market. We will also emphasize the Scrum way of running business, with its essential paradoxes such as the tradeoff between agility and certainty. The course looks at value more broadly than just ROI, taking corporate reputation, team autonomy, and workplace quality into account.

The course is divided into 8 modules: Scrum Introduction; Your Job Managing Products—And More; The Sprint; The Vision & Building the Scrum Organization; How the Product Backlog Works; Life in the Sprint; Putting the Product Backlog to Work; and Running the Business with a Product Backlog.