Value Driven Product Owner Workshop

Get your agile team moving quickly toward the right goal with Product Owners pointing teams toward the right targets. A great way to meet users’ needs is to begin with user stories, which are simple, brief descriptions of functionality valuable to real users. This session covers what makes a great user story, what makes a bad one, and how to achieve the important attributes of a good story along with guidelines for writing a better user story. During this hands-on course, all participants will have the opportunity to practice identifying user roles and writing stories.

Participants (e.g., product managers & business analysts) develop the product backlogs for their current projects by creating ranked user stories with acceptance criteria, where the highest value stories are sized to be completed within one iteration.

Learning Objectives:

1. Develop a deeper understanding of Agile/Scrum practices and the benefits it brings.
2. Enhance application of Agile/Scrum principles, values, ceremonies.
3. Identify and make use of clearly distinguished roles and responsibilities of each person.
4. Establish/extend participants capability to write a good user story with useful acceptance criteria.
5. Explain the value of adding wireframes/workflows to user stories when it makes sense.
6. Understand techniques for prioritization of product backlog, the estimation of backlog items and utilization of a scrum board.
7. Increase effectiveness and efficiency of standup (scrum), review/demonstration, and retrospective ceremonies.

Topics:

1. Strategy-Aligned Goal Setting
2. Personas: Knowing Your Stakeholders
3. Writing Solid User Stories/Epics/Features
4. Assessing Opportunities/Determining Value
5. Defensible Methods for Prioritizing Product Backlogs
6. Product Owner Role/Relationship Husbandry
7. Velocity-Based Planning/Road-Mapping

Instructor:

Scott Stribrny brings nearly 40-years of experience in software, systems, and management to his client engagements and his Loyola Executive Education courses. An internationally acknowledged authority in project management, information systems/technology, systems engineering, and lean development and management, Scott is revolutionizing the intersections of business, technology, and organizational risks.

Beginning a corporate career with a start-up firm that went from zero to 100 million dollars in just five years, Scott moved on to a Fortune 50 conglomerate where he worked with industry leading engineers, scientists, and the executive suite. As a leader, Scott was responsible for the development of groundbreaking products and services where he applied best practices in project management. His accumulated management experience ranges across many industries, including aerospace, telecommunications, finance, insurance, retail, information services, and manufacturing.

Scott is President, co-founder, and managing director of Group Atlantic, Inc.; a senior consultant in the business technologies strategies practice for IT research company the Cutter Consortium; and a thought leader at the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute. He is widely published on the subjects of risk management and project/program management and is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and company events. He teaches courses on leadership development, agile, high-performance teams, requirements definition, risk management, and project estimating, always providing practical, applicable (or actionable) knowledge and content and an innovative, refreshing, and engaging delivery.