New: Agile Product Owner(ship) — From Beginner to Professional

Course launch day. Pour yourself a coffee, this is a long one.

The role of an Agile Product Owner is — without exaggeration — the highest-leverage and worst-understood seat on most agile teams. The team's velocity, the customer's happiness, the engineering org's sanity: all three sit on whether the PO is making good calls. And yet most teams hire a PO the way they hire a project manager who happens to know JIRA. That is the bug. This course is the fix.

What's in the box

The course works from the absolute fundamentals up to the strategic stuff. Eighteen segments, structured so the boring foundational topics are short and the high-leverage ones get real airtime:

• Product Owner 101 — where the role actually came from, and why your project manager isn't one (no matter what their LinkedIn says)
• Successful Product Owner habits — collaboration patterns with engineering, design, and the business
• Product Vision & Roadmap — connecting strategy to the next sprint without faking a Gantt chart
• Value & Risk — how to weigh both on a single backlog without a spreadsheet
• MVP, Prototyping, A/B Testing — picking the smallest honest learning experiment
• Backlog Grooming — the unglamorous weekly habit that makes everything else work
• Avoiding Agile Pitfalls — the half-dozen ways product owners predictably fail and how to spot the warning signs early

The full syllabus (and a few bonus chapters) lives on the course page.

Who this is for

You should take this course if you're:

1. A new product owner who got promoted last quarter and still can't explain why a story sitting in Refinement for three weeks is a bad sign.
2. A senior PO who wants a sanity check — a way to articulate to leadership why the role is what it is when the org tries to dilute it.
3. A scrum master or PM working with a product owner and trying to understand what good looks like from the other side of the standup.
4. A team lead or founder trying to decide whether to hire a PO at all, and if so, what to actually look for.

What you'll be able to do after

• Tell a clean product vision story in two minutes flat
• Run a backlog refinement that engineers don't dread
• Make the value/risk call without three rounds of stakeholder lobbying
• Spot when the role is being eroded by org pressure and push back on it cleanly

→ Take the course

Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment. Pricing on the course page.

Thank you to every product owner I've worked with — including the ones who taught me what not to do. Especially those ones, honestly. The role is hard and the people doing it well usually don't get told often enough. Thank you.

The five PO failure modes the course teaches you to spot early

The "ticket clerk" PO. Spends 90% of the week writing JIRA tickets to engineering's exact spec. Nothing about value, strategy, or customer. Course module 3 reframes this — the PO writes the outcome, engineering owns the implementation.

The "yes-to-everyone" PO. Lets the loudest stakeholder dominate the roadmap. The backlog becomes a wishlist instead of a strategy. Module 7 teaches the "no, here's what we will ship" conversation pattern.

The "absent" PO. Comes to refinement but never to standup, never to demos, never to retro. Engineering loses trust because every decision takes 48 hours. Module 9: PO presence cadences for distributed and co-located teams.

The "release manager in disguise" PO. Treats the sprint like a deadline, ships features by date instead of value. The acceptance criteria become checkboxes. Module 12 covers the outcomes vs outputs distinction with three real-world contrasts.

The "MVP means cheap" PO. Builds the minimum viable product but skips the viable part. Ships things that don't actually test the hypothesis. Module 14 walks the five smallest honest learning experiments — paper prototype, concierge, Wizard of Oz, smoke test, fake door.

The single best PO interview question

"Tell me about a feature you killed. What signal made you kill it, and how did you communicate it to the team that built it?"

If they can't answer this concretely, they've never said no to anything, which means they're a project manager with a different title.

Self-paced, pre-recorded, open enrollment.