Overview

On March 2019, I joined a Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) Training from scrum.co.id.

Most of you might wonder whether I want to change my career from SM to PO by taking this training.

Well, no 🙂 I had different intention when attending this training.

Basically there were two reasons:

1. One of the responsibilities of SM is to serve the PO.
   I have my own thought about serving, maybe this is just me, but when I serve – or help – (of anything) I want to have more impact.
   Which for me, it will be more impact full if I can see things from how they see things.
   
   
2. I wanted to learn how to train others.
   By joining the training, I will see how the trainer give the training. Some of the technique I can use in the organization to train other people. Let’s just say learning from the expert 🙂

My Takeaways

From that 2 days training, I realized that I still have so many homework to do as a Scrum Master.
If I relate with what happen in my Organization, the biggest and the hardest homework is helping the PO to shift from PO as Scribe / Analyst to PO as Mini CEO (Product Owner Maturity Level).

This is not an easy job, considering most of the POs in my Organization were Business Analysts before we implement Scrum.

I also learned a lot about Evidence Based Management that the PO must understand.
This is also a homework for me, to help them understand those Metrics and start using them to maximize the value of their product.

Another thing that I learned was how to set up Vision, how to link that from company vision to team’s daily goal.

We also did an exercise on making our own product. Some tools we use for that exercise are creating the Vision, Lean Canvas, Product In A Box, setting up the goals for each release, etc.

There are other things thought there. Trust me, all of them are so interesting, informative and useful.
I’m not going to write all here. I suggest you to take the training to get to know deeper about Product Ownership.

Conclusion

I learned a lot on that training.

Few days after the training, there was a Sprint Retrospective for one of my teams. In that event I reminded the team about the role of the PO, what they should expect from him and what they need to do as Dev Team to make our team work better.

Learning from how others see things actually works well.
I can feel more empathy to POs and have better understanding on what kind of support they need from me as an SM.

So whoever you are, be it a SM or a PO, I recommend you take this training.

As a suggestion, if you’re a PO, try to take SM training too… let’s see if the magic works for you too.