Disclaimer: I came to the class, because I already knew Mike as one of the best trainers I've ever seen. I have also been to several other classes by him. It might have made my opinion biased.
Since after I went to product management and found out that Scrum Alliance started offering the Certified Product Owner (CPO) classes I was thinking about taking this class, but was not really sure. After all I did know what Scrum was about, had quite some practical and consulting Scrum Master experience, I was even educating some Product Owners around. What new could the Product Owner class offer to me?
Value
This week I devoted two days of my Oslo trip to the CPO class by Mike Cohn and can share the impressions with you. The class goes deep into the needs of the Scrum Product Owner and covers pretty much everything a decent agile leader would need. It includes general overview of Scrum, techniques for coming up with the vision, building a solid product backlog, effectively guiding a cross functional team, etc., etc. There is nothing like the practical experiences and plenty of exercises included make you feel the real "product ownership" as much as it can be done in a classroom.
The bottom line for me is that the CPO class is well worth its money and is clearly distinct from the old good Certified Scrum Master (CSM) class. CPO won't provide you with as solid understanding of the Scrum process mechanics as CSM, but will arm you exceptionally well for playing the Product Owner role efficiently. It is hardly possible to start implementing Scrum with the amount of knowledge offered by the CPO class. However, once you get the process started, CPO will help you get most of the development effort. Highly recommended for those in charge of the success of the software based products.
What is in it for you?
What would you expect from the CPO class? Also if you are interested in knowing more about the course, feel free to ask in the comments, I will try replying as accurately as my memory allows for.
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Comments
Certified Product owner
Interesting comments. Re " It is hardly possible to start implementing Scrum with the amount of knowledge offered by the CPO class". Are you saying that the Certified Scrum Master Course alone is not of use except if blended with a Certified Product Owner course - both of which are very expensive?
Thanks
Practical experience is the best training
I was trying to say the opposite: In my opinion CPO course alone is not enough to start the Scrum implementation. If you study well, it will make you a better Product Owner, but CPO course doesn't go into deep details of what is not directly related to the PO (e.g. how to conduct retrospectives, how to run daily Scrums, etc).
No two-day course can make you a master of any process. CSM class covers the whole process, CPO class covers only PO related part of the process, but goes into much more detail and has much more PO-targeted exercises.
Does it answer the question? :)
I took the class
Hello, I took the two day class. I've been a agile business analyst and PO for almost 10 years now, so I didn't really get anything new out of it. But there were some newcomers who I believe must have learned a lot of new things.
Subject matter aside, Mike is not a good teacher. When he and the other little guy Ken don't know the answer to something, they're really flip about it. Dismissive. And whatever crappy answer they come up with is something along the lines of "you can't possibly expect me to answer THAT question." When I disagreed with something that they were peddling, Mike actually pointed to Ken and said to me "Here's the guy that wrote the book on what you think you're talking about."
Scrum is their claim to fame. Good for them for taking something that people have been doing for years and writing a book about it. But they have no credibility with me b/c they haven't been on a dev team in decades. And it really shows with both their interpersonal skills and lack of knowledge on effective ways to scale agile to the enterprise.
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