Practical Product Owner Workshop: Deliver What Your Customers Value and Need

I no longer offer this workshop. Please see Practical Product Leadership: Deliver Better and Faster with Continual Replanning Workshop for the updated syllabus.

Does this describe your product ownership predicament:

• You are supposed to be the product manager, product owner, and business analyst. You might even juggle different responsibilities for multiple teams.
• You struggle to read your customer's mind and deliver a product that delights them.
• You aren't sure you're making the right decisions for the product or the team.
• You're not collaborating with other stakeholders enough or effectively.
• Your collaborators have different ideas about the level of features they define with you. Some want to define buttons. Some define epics you don't understand.
• You don't have collaborative discussions with other stakeholders. You hear requests for constant change or philosophical debates about the value of the project.

If so,  you need this Practical Product Owner workshop. You will learn how to:

• Reduce the number of meetings you have to have with your stakeholders, clients, or customers that seem to circle again to decisions you thought you already made.
• Only work on features the customer finds most valuable.
• Work in an agile way, showing value every day.
• Avoid other people thinking about the design, rather than the problem
• How to help the product proceed in the direction that returns the most value.

We’ll cover how you can be an agile product owner and have a successful relationship with the product manager, the team, the customer, and across the organization.  During the 6 weeks of our workshop, you will work on your actual projects, so you will learn by doing.

This training is for:

• Product owners, Product Managers and anyone else working on the product ownership deliverables
• Project Managers and Scrum Masters
• Consultants who play the product owner role
• DevLeads and Development Managers who play the Product Owner role
• Departments who are asked to represent their needs to development teams
• Business Analysts who “fill in” for the product owner

Here's what you'll learn in each session:

• Session 1: Titles and how to decide what you are. Principles of agile and lean. Apply those principles to creating the big picture roadmap.
• Session 2: Roadmap to backlogs. Stories, story mapping. Done. Your users.
• Session 3: Value your stories. When and how to use estimation. Cost of Delay. The difference between the project portfolio and your product's roadmap/backlog.
• Session 4: See progress: Accepting stories, demos, measurements. What to use as feedback for you, the customers, the project team, anyone else.
• Session 5: PO and servant leadership. Meetings, retrospectives, planning, and when to use which kind of meeting.
• Session 6: Common tips and traps of product ownership.

I limit registration to 10 people, so I can provide you the best learning environment. That way, we have enough time to discuss and work through your issues. I provide an email list for us to discuss issues and see homework on a regular basis. I will ask you questions and respond by email during the workshop.

“We've leveraged Johanna Rothman's “Practical Product Owner” workshop as a critical component of our strategy to equip new POs with the thinking tools that help them become agile product managers. Through interactive class discussions, meaningful homework and experience-sharing in a safe environment with other peers, I've seen a tremendous difference in the growth of our POs as a result of completing Johanna's excellent program. Highly recommended!”– Jorgen Hesselberg, Agile Enterprise Transformation, Fortune 100 Company

“I asked many questions in our training. I received many answers. I liked the fact that we had real life examples and could discuss our situations at work. Our homework was based on our work, which I found helpful. The workshop was useful because we could apply many of the concepts to our daily tasks.” — Marcelo Leonetti,  Product Owner