Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) Training

Learn the secrets of the most successful Scrum Product Owners

What if you could feel confident that your product backlog holds just the right details at the right time?

• You have clarity and alignment on what the most important work is.
• Your team has the information they need to create solutions that thrill your customers.
• Your stakeholders trust your roadmaps that show your team’s trajectory for the next three, six, or even 12 months.
• You end your day feeling calm and prepared instead of stressed out that you’ve missed something important.

The best Product Owners know how to make that happen every day. And you can learn their secrets in Humanizing Work’s Certified Scrum Product Owner® workshop.

Discover how you can quickly figure out where to start, get feedback fast, and recognize what to do next. Explore a new way to think about complexity and planning. Gain the ability to identify early value and mitigate risk—even on large efforts—as you become a more effective Product Owner for any Scrum team.

Come prepared to participate! Instead of death-by-PowerPoint, Humanizing Work’s brain-friendly training style means you’ll dig deep into a real-world project, learn by doing, and practice your new skills. Whether in-person or virtual, Humanizing Work provides engaging, practice-driven training experiences.

You’ll find out how to harness complexity and change for your advantage. You’ll see how to build learning into your projects. And you’ll uncover new ways to communicate effectively with your team and stakeholders.

With successful course completion, you achieve the designation of Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Product Owner® (and become eligible to continue on to our Advanced CSPO program).

What to expect

We take training and learning seriously and take your decision to spend time advancing your skills and improving yourself seriously. As such, we use the latest training approaches and techniques, and we bring energy and fun, to ensure you have the best possible experience and learn as much as possible.

• Brain-based training to dramatically increase learning and retention
• Expect to be challenged and look at ways you need to change to help your team be more successful
• Opportunities throughout the course to focus on your real-world situations
• Advanced and cutting-edge skills and techniques to deal with the specific challenges you are facing
• In-depth engagement with your instructors and fellow attendees. If you are looking for a dry lecture, this class is NOT for you!
• Interactive, fun, and experiential learning — increasing safety and retention — laughing helps learning

Course Topics & Learning Objectives

Take advantage of our industry experience and immerse yourself in the key skills and practices you need to succeed as an Agile Product Owner. Throughout this CSPO course, you’ll:

• Explore the mindset of an effective Product Owner, especially how to think about complexity and change and their impact on projects & products
• Understand the role of the Product Owner in Scrum (and in other related Agile approaches)
• Learn key practices and tools for Product Owners not covered in Scrum, including what’s required to build and maintain a good product backlog

By the end of our time together, you’ll be able to:

• Define great Product Ownership and illustrate that definition with examples from your own experience
• Explain the Scrum Framework with emphasis on the Product Owner’s role in it
• Explain why things are predictable sometimes and not others—and how to tell the difference in advance and what to do about it
• Describe how to structure work for a project or product to benefit from change
• Discover and align your team around your customers’ real needs so you can focus on what’s most valuable
• Craft a compelling, vivid Product Vision statement
• Use Feature Mining to find a first slice of a big idea (such as a project, a new product, or even a new business idea)—a first slice that will produce early value, learning and/or risk mitigation
• Write clear, valuable user stories
• Slice features and big user stories into small stories so your team can deliver every Sprint
• Structure a product backlog to have just the right amount of detail at the right time—not too early or too late
• Forecast a release (date/scope) over a product backlog and account for risk and change

Who should attend

This course is for you if:

• You’re Product Owner or Product Manager on a struggling project and want to find your smartest next step FAST
• You’re Product Owner for an IT team with multiple systems and diverse stakeholders and you need tools to make everybody happy while maximizing value for your organization
• You have a big idea for a new product or project but you don’t know where to start
• You’re a ScrumMaster who wants to help your Product Owner be more effective in their role
• You’re making the transition from traditional product management to an agile approach
• You just want to take your Product Ownership skills to the next level

Continuing Education Credits and Certification

This CSPO course earns 16 PMI PDUs or Scrum Alliance SEUs.

All CSPO courses from Humanizing Work are taught by Certified Scrum Trainers. Successfully completing a CSPO course and accepting the license agreement designates you as a Certified Scrum Product Owner and indicates you’ve been introduced to and understand the basic concepts needed to perform as Product Owner on a Scrum team.

About the CSPO Course Facilitator

Richard Lawrence

Richard Lawrence’s superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities. Drawing on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science, Richard trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems.

Richard created the wildly-popular “How to Split a User Story” flowchart, which has been downloaded over 1 million times and translated into several languages.

Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com).

When he’s not working with clients, you’ll often find Richard cooking, playing music, practicing Muay Thai, or flying down a mountain on his mountain bike.

Private Courses & Training

Bring this training into your organization! Public courses are great for individuals or small groups to grow their skills in a cost-effective way. But there’s nothing like a private workshop that just includes people from your organization. Private workshops allow you to dig deep into your unique challenges and opportunities.

For information about private workshops, group discounts or questions, contact us.

What Participants Say

This course presented a variety of techniques and skills to help me become a better Product Owner. The subject matter was directly applicable to my role.

The hands-on and interactive design of this training helped me learn how to apply the knowledge gained.

Very engaging instructors – great use of examples and humor gets points across.

Upcoming Workshops