In-Person Passionate Product Leadership Workshop - PARIS, France

Stop! Don’t bother taking this course if your only concern is learning Scrum and mastering the product ownership role. Because:

This in-person workshop is about product thinking and how to apply it in your organization.

A strong product-centric approach places emphasis on customers and users and creating successful outcomes and, ultimately, a big impact on your business. All that sounds good, maybe obvious, right? But, in your organization you may be focused more on happy business stakeholders and on-time delivery than successful products. It’s not that those things aren’t important. It’s just that focusing mostly on those things can distract you and your team from really focusing on the outcomes that benefit your organization.

One of the first things you’ll learn is that, while “product owner” may be a Scrum role, product ownership is a whole team responsibility. If you’re a product owner or product manager you likely already know that you’ll be the most successful if you’re collaborating effectively with your whole team, and if your whole team understands product thinking.

This workshop will help you build a deeper understanding of product thinking and the ways of working that support it. We’ll build on agile principles and Scrum practice and add back the product thinking you don’t get with agile development alone. You’ll leave with a mindset that will help you help others in your organization, along with the practices that’ll help you do your job on a daily basis.

You may have noticed that technology products are different today than they were 10 or 20 years ago. They work more like services. They continuously evolve and improve. And, not surprisingly, the way we design and build them has evolved and improved. In this workshop we’ll talk about approaches we layer on top of agile development and the Scrum framework. Things like:

• Lean Startup and Lean UX practice
• Design Thinking
• Dual-Track Development
• User Stories and Story Mapping

You’ll learn how these contemporary practices knit together in a holistic approach to product development. You’ll learn how to:

• Evaluate how product-centric your process is today
• Organize product teams around your products and product areas
• Understand the critical product leadership roles on a product team
• Scale product teams within large complex organizations
• Build shared understanding of your current products using simple proto-personas and journey maps
• Identify good product metrics
• Write useful OKRs that help your team focus prioritization and planning
• Organize product roadmaps and strategic plans around business outcomes
• Drive product discovery work using hypotheses and tests
• Create successful product release strategies that emphasize earning and learning with each release
• Create successful development strategies that emphasize predictability and quality
• Work with your team to help them tactically plan and manage each sprint
• Integrate continuous discovery and delivery in dual-track development

I’ll teach this workshop using a mixture of discussion, traditional presentation, and lots of live hand-drawing to support discussions. If you’ve seen a talk from me, you know what this looks like. It’s immensely easier to focus on than powerpoint bullets. It looks a little like this:

While one person in a team may hold a product manager or product ownership role, it takes a cross-functional team with strong product thinking to design and build the product. That’s why this class isn’t just for product owners.

• If you’re a product manager or product owner, this workshop is for you.
• One thing you likely already know is that best product decisions balance business, user experience and technology concerns. If you’re a UX practitioner or senior engineer, this workshop is for you.
• If you’re a Scrum master or agile coach, have you seen your organization struggle to apply product thinking using a Scrum and agile approach? If you’d like to better understand how to help your organization become a strong product organization, this workshop is for you.
• If you’re a business stakeholder, manager, or leader in your organization, do you understand how product thinking changes the way you’ll need to work with teams? If you’d like to better understand how to motivate teams and keep them focused on successful outcomes while being self-directed, this workshop is for you.

We’ve got a lot to cover, and it’ll take 2 full days to do it.

We’ll meet daily, Wednesday and Thursday:

9:00 am CEST to 5:00 pm CEST (doors will open a little earlier so you can get settled in and enjoy a light breakfast that we'll provide each day).

We’ll take frequent short breaks so you can stay focused.

We’ll keep the class exercise groups small. You’ll do team work in smaller groups of ideally 3 to 5 people and have some one-on-one conversations with other participants. Ideally you’ll get to meet and speak with everyone in the workshop.

Worksheets, articles, and a 120-page course guide: Supporting material will help you recall and practice everything we discuss in the workshop.

Scrum Alliance Certification: This is a certified scrum product ownership course, so at the conclusion of the class - if you attended the entire class - you’ll receive CSPO certification with the Scrum Alliance along with membership in the Scrum Alliance.

Catered meals and snacks each day: light breakfast, lunch, morning/afternoon snacks and some beverages.

I’m Jeff Patton. I’ve been in Software development for over 25 years. I started working with Extreme Programming in 2000. The term Agile was coined in 2001 and I learned I was using an Agile process. In that first Agile job, my business card said “product manager.” While I’ve served in almost every role in software development, product leadership is where I’ve always focused.

I’ve learned over the past 20 years that good product thinking takes a blend of good business thinking, product management, user experience design, and strong engineering practice. It can only be done as a collaborative effort. And, I merge all these disciplines together as best I can in what I teach.

Glube: A friend of mine used this made-up word combining “glue” and “lube.” And, that’s what I do. I help keep all these practices glued together in one holistic approach, and help keep them each spinning and interacting smoothly.

I’m known for lots of public speaking and for authoring the book User Story Mapping.

• Visualizing output, outcome, and impact
• Understanding and evaluating the whole product development lifecycle
• Understanding the biggest threats to product-centric process
• Organizing product teams around your products

• User stories and story essentials
• Story Mapping
• Proto-personas and journey maps
• Identifying product problems and opportunities
• Product metrics and KPIs
• Using vision, strategy, and OKRs to focus priority

• Evaluating and prioritizing opportunities
• Turning ideas into hypotheses
• Identifying risky assumptions and tests
• Involving the whole team in discovery activities
• Continuous discovery and delivery using dual-track development

• Breaking down features using a story map
• Creating an incremental release strategy
• Identifying releases to learn and releases to earn
• Creating development strategies focused on predictability and quality
• Collaborating with the team every sprint

That's a lot! So, I'm not making any promises. Topics may be exchanged or deleted based on interactions in class.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

BENEXT, Be Your Potential, 4 Rue du Bouloi, Paris, France