• Agile
• Scrum

• Timeboxes
• No Changes Allowed
• Reciprocal Commitments
• Defining Done
• Sprint Types
• Introducing Change into a Sprint

• Rights & Responsibilities
• Self-Organizing
• Cross-Functional
• Collaborating
• Component and Feature Teams

• What is a Product Owner?
• Rights & Responsibilities
• Managing Stakeholders

• The Scrum Master    
• Rights & Responsibilities
• Four Facilitation Techniques
• Coaching, Mentoring, Teaching & Facilitating
• The Scrum Master in Dual Roles
• Servant Leadership

• Project Managers
• Functional (Department) Managers

• Responsibilities & Attributes
• User & Job Stories
• Two Ways of Adding Detail
• Progressive Refinement
• Organizing the Backlog
• Story Splitting

• Fixed-Date Plans
• Fixed-Scope Plans
• Creating the Plan
• Technical Debt

• Relative Estimating
• Story Points
• Ideal Time
• Affinity Estimation
• Three Ways to Estimate Velocity

• Meeting Responsibilities
• The Sprint Goal
• The Purpose
• Capacity-Driven Sprint Planning
• Velocity-Driven Sprint Planning
• Decomposing Stories into Tasks
• Working Out of Order
• What To Do When the Product Owner Is Missing

• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective
• Product Backlog Refinement

• Scaling Guidelines
• Scaling the Planning Meeting
• Scrum of Scrums
• Communities of Practice

Go beyond the rules of Scrum to understand the principles that make agile work. Explore how Scrum fits alongside other agile approaches and what must be preserved when teams adapt practices to real-world constraints.

Clarify what it truly means to be an effective Scrum Master. Examine the behaviors, responsibilities, and boundaries of the role—and how great Scrum Masters build trust, influence outcomes, and avoid becoming process police.

Learn advanced facilitation techniques for challenging situations. Practice guiding discussions when there is disagreement, ambiguity, or strong emotion, helping groups reach clarity and decisions without forcing consensus.

Develop coaching skills that help teams grow rather than depend on you. Learn when and how to coach individuals and teams, how to work through resistance, and how to choose the most effective stance in the moment.

Explore what enables teams to move from working to truly high-performing. Examine collaboration, quality, and delivery patterns, and how Scrum Masters can support Product Owners and teams through discovery, refinement, and continuous improvement.

Understand how organizational systems affect team performance. Examine common structural impediments, apply systems thinking and root-cause analysis, and learn how Scrum Masters can influence change beyond a single team.

Bring the learning together with a focus on your own development. Assess your strengths and growth areas and leave with a clearer path for becoming a more effective, influential Scrum Master.

• Agile
• Scrum

• What Is a Product Owner?
• Characteristics
• Responsibilities
• Product Owners in Different Contexts
• Quarterly Activities
• Involvement over Time
• Asking for Clarifications, Not Changes
• Dealing with Difficult Situations
• Business Analysts & Product Managers
• Scaling the Product Owner Role

• Specifying the Problem, Not the Solution
• Creating a Concise Vision
• Five Techniques for Communicating Vision

• Validating Assumptions
• User Roles
• User Role Modeling
• Personas
• Roles vs. Personas
• Decorated Roles & Extreme Characters

• What Is a Product Backlog?
• Progressive Elaboration
• Product Backlog Refinement 
• User Stories
• Adding Detail to User Stories
• Job Stories
• Technical Stories
• Themes & Epics
• Splitting Stories with the SPIDR Approach
• Who Contributes Items?
• Story Writing Workshop
• Story Mapping

• Key Concepts in Prioritization
• Factors in Prioritization
• Formal Approaches
• What Different Stakeholders Value
• Collaborative Prioritization Techniques

• Accuracy and Precision
• Velocity
• Using a Velocity Range
• Fixed-Date Plans
• Fixed-Scope Plans

• Responsibilities
• Description of Role

• Responsibilities
• Component and Feature Teams

This course addresses the real challenges product owners face: competing priorities, stakeholder pressure, uncertainty, and product decision-making.

Explore agile principles through a product lens, focusing on how discovery, delivery, and learning work together. Learn how effective product owners think about value, uncertainty, and outcomes — and how to apply agile principles when real-world constraints complicate “textbook” Scrum.

Deepen your understanding of the product owner as a decision-maker and product leader. Examine responsibilities, boundaries, and common role traps, and learn how experienced product owners build trust and influence without relying on authority.

Strengthen your ability to articulate product direction in ways that guide real decisions. Learn how vision, goals, and outcomes connect to prioritization and how product owners maintain strategic focus amid competing demands and short-term pressure.

Practice making difficult prioritization decisions when everything feels important. Explore how to evaluate options, weigh constraints, and make trade-offs transparently — including how to say “no” while preserving relationships and trust.

Develop skills for working productively with diverse stakeholders. Learn how to lead conversations that surface assumptions, align on outcomes, and move discussions from opinions and requests to evidence-based decisions.

Examine how data, feedback, and experimentation inform better product choices. Learn how to balance learning and delivery, interpret signals responsibly, and avoid false certainty when evidence is incomplete or conflicting.

Bring the learning together with a focus on your own development as a product owner. Reflect on strengths and growth areas, clarify your leadership stance, and leave with a clearer path for increasing your impact in complex product environments.

• Introduction
• Some Sample User Stories
• Card, Conversation, Confirmation
• Is a Template for Use Really Necessary Really Necessary
• Detail Is Deliberately Deferred
• Stories Are Pointers to Requirements
• How Stories Differ from ‘System Shall’ Statements
• How Stories Differ from Use Cases

• Introduction to User Roles and Personas
• User Rules – Context, Characteristics, and Criteria
• How to Do User Role Model
• Creating Personas for High-Consideration Products
• Attributes to Consider When Creating a Persona
• Documenting a Persona
• Systems and Developers as Users
• Decorated User Rolls
• Writing User Stories for the Right User

• Introduction to Story-Writing Workshops and Story Mapping
• The Four Times to Write Stories
• The Significant Objective Focuses the Scope of a Story-Writing Workshop
• Story-Writing Workshop, Attendees, Duration, and Preparation
• The Story-Writing Workshop Agenda
• Story Mapping
• Going Deeper with Story Mapping
• Making Decisions with a Story Map
• Organizing Stories with a Goal Story Hierarchy or a Mind Map

• Introduction to Adding Detail
• Progressive Refinement – Adding Detail Over Time
• Epics and Themes – Some Clear, Useful Definitions and Examples.
• Two Ways of Adding Detail to a Story
• Why I Prefer Conditions of Satisfaction Rather than Acceptance Criteria
• How Much Detail Is Appropriate
• Working with the Team That Wants Too Much Detail
• Definition of Ready and Why Having One Could Be Dangerous

• Introduction to INVESTing in Good Stories
• Independent
• Negotiable
• Luggable
• Estimated
• Small or Sized Appropriately
• Testable

•  

• The Introduction to Complex and Compound Stories
• The SPIDR Approach to Splitting Stories
• S – Splitting Stories with Spikes
• P – Splitting Stories Along Paths
• I – Splitting Stories by Interfaces
• D – Splitting Stories by Data
• R – Splitting Stories by Rules
• Tracer Bullets
• Closed Stories
• Three Things to Do When You Can't Split a Story

• Introduction to Overcoming Common Problems
• Managing Dependencies Between Stories
• Stories with Too Much Detail
• Spending Too Much Time Splitting Stories
• Stories Involving More than One Team
• Stories That Are Really Tasks
• Managing the Need for a Requirement Document

• Introduction to Not Everything Needs to Be a User Story
• Nonfunctional Require Requirements
• Stories and Bugs
• Features from Future–Driven Development
• Job Stories
• Looking Further at Job Stories

• Remembering the Purpose of User Stories

• Good Plans Lead to the Right Decisions
• Why Estimating in Person-Days Does Not Work

• What Story Points Are
• Using an Appropriate Scale
• Five Types of Estimates and Which Works
• Planning Poker and Affinity Estimating

• Fixed-Date Plans
• Fixed-Scope Plans
• Fixed-Everything Plans
• Estimating Velocity
• Estimating Velocity Without Data (or Even a Team)

• Why Your Product Backlog Is Bigger than You Think
• Estimating the Unknown Backlog

• Don’t Pad a Plan but Buffer What Matters
• Why Two Estimates Are Better (and Faster) than One
• Measuring Risk
• Creating the Buffered Plan

• Seven Things to Do to Get Better, Faster Estimates
• Four Things to Stop Doing

• Explaining Story Points
• Explaining What Makes a Good Estimate or Plan
• Answering Questions about the Plan