Product Owner: Essential Skills and Tools for Innovation

Overview

By the end of this course, a learner will be able to: Explain how to refine and evolve the product vision and strategy over time, aligning it with changing market conditions, customer needs, and organizational goals. Explore advanced techniques for managing the product backlog effectively, including backlog prioritization strategies, leveraging AI, and dealing with technical debt. Illustrate advanced techniques for user story mapping, including creating story maps for complex products, identifying minimum viable products (MVPs), and refining product roadmaps. Summarize lean startup principles and practices for validating assumptions, experimenting with ideas, and maximizing value delivery while minimizing waste. Describe how to plan and prioritize product releases and scale Scrum based on business value, risk, and market feedback.

Syllabus

Introduction to Product Ownership and Strategic Foundations

In this module, you will learn about Product Ownership and Strategic Foundations. In lesson 1, we will begin with a review of the Product Owner’s key role and responsibilities to collaborate with customers and development teams. We will then shift our focus to the Product Owner’s role in achieving value for customers and their organization. Lesson 2 is an overview of a requirements elicitation process, how to develop an effective scenario, and how a Product Owner must effectively manage technical debt. Then, we have a lab that will challenge you to develop value driven user stories to support a scenario.

Product Planning, Roadmaps, and Metrics

In this module, we will focus on the Product Owner’s role in strategic and operational planning. We will discuss the Product Owner role in strategic planning and ensuring governance considerations are identified and managed. We will introduce a key strategic planning tool used by Product Owners called “Lean Canvas”. The need to establish effective measures for project success will also be discussed. We then shift our attention to operational planning. Key topics include Product Roadmaps, scaling Agile, and release planning. You will have two lab opportunities. The first will challenge you to perform a Lean Canvas analysis. The second will focus on release planning.

Agile Practices, Technical Skills, and Communication

In this module, we begin with discussions regarding Agile documentation, personas, and UX Integration. You will have an opportunity to develop a persona based on a customer scenario. Product acceptance testing and how a Product Owner effectively collaborates with the UX team will be explained. We then shift our focus to product development planning and visual tools. We will cover the Product Owner’s role in the Product Management Lifecycle, their role in velocity management, the use of various visual tools, and how to manage feedback. You will be challenged in a lab to perform velocity planning based on a realistic scenario.