SolutionsIQ’s Certified Product Owner Course
Working as both a Developer and as a ScrumMaster has skewed my perspective a bit to be dev-team centric, so I recently took SolutionsIQ’s Certified Product Owner course to learn more about the scrum software development process through the eyes of a Product Owner.
The course was laid out in a novel way – as a scrum project itself! As Product Owners we were asked to compose User Stories capturing what we hoped to learn from the course, and at the end of each “iteration” within the two-day course, were asked to re-prioritize these, knowing time was tight and we may not get to all topics. This helped us to have hands-on experience with Story creation and re-prioritization, with the added bonus of us each being personally invested in the outcome instead of it being a theoretical scenario.
One of the topics I was interested in was how to adapt the scrum process for a Product Owner that is not only not on site, but is overseas and in a different time zone. At 2Paths, one of our larger projects that was recently completed involved a client overseas. This project was very successful, and we accredited much of its success to our client’s buy-in and participation to our scrum process. We had, however, modified the traditional scrum process to accommodate our client’s schedule and time availability. Because they were quite busy with other projects, and due to the large time difference, the client didn’t attend our daily scrum as is recommended. Instead we had weekly phone check-ins which augmented our regular email communication to discuss issues as needed.
I was hoping in the course to see if there would be a more recommended way for this sort of Product Owner to be involved in a project, and how we could try to more closely follow the traditional scrum process. However, the course was more geared towards an internal Product Owner. This type of Product Owner would be a lot more hands on, would physically attend the daily scrum, and spend time sitting within the dev team to facilitate clearer communication. It also seemed that many of the other course attendees had similar project roles where the Product Owner was in-house. From what I could gather, I think we handled our process as well as we could given the circumstances.
The course was well organized, and the two presenters Bryan Stallings and Skip Angel were quite knowledgeable and helpful. We had many good group discussions and participants actively participated, sharing their own war stories. I’d recommend this course for other ScrumMasters wanting to get a better sense of what is required by a Product Owner, and how they fit into the scrum process.
Tags: agile, certification, product owner, scrum
