Agile Software Development

Last week while taking the Certified Scrum Product Owner course in Oslo I had a pleasure to have an interview with our trainer Mike Cohn, an author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied. Mike shared his point of view on the value of yet another certified Scrum Alliance course and provided advices for those going to become Scrum Product Owners.

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?

Today in the evening I am leaving Finland for the Mike Cohn's Certified Product Owner (CPO) course in Norway. The last couple of years I was mainly focused on the in-team part of Scrum and after moving to product management I feel the need to refresh my knowledge about the external side of the process. Mike is an excellent trainer and is a very pleasant person himself. Every time I meet him I learn much from his talks about both the theory and the practical experience.

Agile certifications

It reminded me about a number of recent discussions on the value of certifications in the agile community. The proponents of the certification processes usually argue that both community and companies want to have means for distinguishing amateurs from the specialists.