Professional Scrum Product Owner – Advanced (PSPO-A)
Who This Course Is For
- You have held the Product Owner accountability for a year or more and the basics are no longer the problem.
- You can run refinement and write good Product Backlog Items — but you struggle to say no to the people who fund you.
- You are asked to justify value, defend a roadmap, or negotiate a contract, and the frameworks you learned do not reach that far.
- You want to sharpen judgement, not learn more mechanics.
Not for you if you are new to the role. Start with PSPO-AI or a foundational Professional Scrum Product Owner class instead — this course assumes real scar tissue and moves fast.
Why Advanced, and Why Now
Most Product Owner training teaches the role as a set of mechanics: order the backlog, write the items, run the events, meet the stakeholders. Those mechanics are learnable in two days, and once you have them, they stop being what holds you back.
What holds experienced Product Owners back is different, and harder. It is the stakeholder with budget authority who wants a feature that will not move the needle. It is the roadmap you are asked to commit to eighteen months out. It is the moment when two options are both genuinely defensible, no further analysis will separate them, and someone still has to choose. None of that is solved by knowing the Scrum Guide better.
“The gap between a competent Product Owner and a formidable one is almost never knowledge. It is the willingness to make a call under real uncertainty and own it in public.”
This course exists for that gap. It is built around structured practice, not lecture: you work real situations, defend your reasoning to peers who will push back, and leave with a sharper sense of when your instincts are reliable and when they are not.
The Six Stances of a Product Owner
Scrum.org frames advanced product ownership around six stances a Product Owner moves between depending on what the situation demands. They are not personality types or a maturity ladder — they are postures you deliberately adopt and drop:
- The Customer Representative — knowing what your product actually is, who it serves, and what value means to them rather than to you.
- The Visionary — setting a Product Goal that survives contact with reality, and connecting it to strategy people can act on.
- The Experimenter — treating your assumptions as testable, and choosing the cheapest experiment that would actually change your mind.
- The Decision Maker — deciding well under uncertainty, and recognising when you face a dilemma rather than a decision.
- The Collaborator — working across governance, budgeting, forecasting and contracts without pretending those constraints do not exist.
- The Influencer — building a stakeholder strategy, and saying no in a way that preserves the relationship.
Scrum.org describes these stances publicly — you can read their own material on the six stances of the Product Owner before you decide whether the class is for you. What the course adds is the practice: working through situations where two stances pull in opposite directions and you have to pick one.
What the Course Covers
Over two days you work through the areas where advanced Product Owners most often get stuck:
| Theme | What you practise |
|---|---|
| Defining the product | Drawing product boundaries that hold up — and noticing when your “product” is really a component someone else owns |
| Value and pricing | Separating value from price, articulating customer outcomes, and pressure-testing a pricing model |
| Product Goals and strategy | Writing goals that constrain choices, and connecting vision to measurable outcomes |
| Experimentation | Selecting techniques by evidence strength and cost, and setting a decision rule before you run the test |
| Decision-making | Evaluating decision quality separately from outcome quality; recognising and navigating genuine dilemmas |
| Governance and forecasting | Rolling-wave forecasting, budget horizons, and what belongs in an agile contract |
| Stakeholders | Mapping influence and interest, building an engagement strategy, and declining well |
Throughout, you carry a single product of your own through the class, so the exercises compound rather than resetting each session. Bring a real product you are working on — the class is significantly more useful when you do.
Format, Dates and Certification
Quick Class Facts
- Duration: 2 days, live online (also available as 4 half-day sessions for distributed teams)
- Prerequisite: Practical experience as a Product Owner; foundational Scrum knowledge assumed
- Class size: Capped, so every participant gets airtime
- Language: English
- Trainer: Sanjay Saini, licensed Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org
Certification
Attendees receive a password for the Scrum.org PSPO II assessment. Scrum.org sets the terms of the assessment attempt and any retake policy — check the current terms on Scrum.org's PSPO-A page, as these are set by Scrum.org and can change.
The certification is worth having, but it is not the reason to attend. If you want the credential alone, the assessment is open to anyone. Come for the two days of argument with people who own similar problems.
Not sure whether you are ready for the advanced class?
Take our free, 25-question self-check on advanced product ownership. It scores you across five areas — product definition, value and pricing, experimentation, decision-making, and stakeholder strategy — and tells you honestly where your gaps are. No sign-up, no email required.
Your Trainer
Sanjay Saini is a licensed Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and the founder of AgileWoW. He has trained thousands of Product Owners, Scrum Masters and Agile leaders across India and internationally, and runs four annual practitioner conferences including Product Leaders Day India.
His classes are known for being argumentative in the productive sense: participants are expected to defend positions, and the trainer will push. If you want a lecture, this is the wrong room.
Frequently Asked Questions
A foundational class teaches the accountability, the events and the artefacts. This one assumes you have all that and works on judgement: how you decide, how you handle stakeholders with power, and how you defend value. If you have never held the role, you will get more from starting elsewhere.
No formal certification is required. What is required is real experience — the exercises assume you have your own product problems to bring, and the discussion depends on participants having lived through the situations under examination.
Yes. Most of the content — product definition, value, pricing, experimentation, decision-making, stakeholder strategy — applies to any product role. The Scrum framing gives it structure but the problems are not Scrum-specific.
The large majority is practice: exercises, small-group work, and structured debate on your own products. Lecture segments are short and exist to set up the exercise that follows.
Yes. Private cohorts are common and often more valuable, because the whole group shares context and can work on the same real product decisions. Contact us for scope and dates.
A real product you currently own or influence, and at least one decision about it that you are genuinely unsure about. The class is built to be applied, and participants who bring a live problem get considerably more out of it.
Working with AI in your product practice?
Advanced judgement and AI fluency are complementary, not competing. Our PSPO-AI workshop covers AI-assisted discovery, backlog refinement and prioritisation for Product Owners who want to orchestrate rather than type.
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