PSPO II case studies

PSPO II · Put your knowledge to work in context.

Professional Scrum Product Owner II (PSPO II) sits in the middle of Scrum.org's Product Owner certification path, which the Scrum.org site describes as offering "fundamental, advanced & distinguished levels of Product Owner knowledge in levels I, II & III". Level I confirms that you know the vocabulary of Product Ownership; level II probes whether you can exercise judgment with it - ordering a Product Backlog when every stakeholder claims priority, weighing customer input against empirical evidence, and steering a product by outcomes rather than by output. The PSPO II case studies are 5 cases and about 4,344 words.

The mid-Sprint favour and the DoD that doesn't apply to bugs

Nine months into a product used by 4,000 customers, a Scrum Team of six Developers runs two-week Sprints. At each Sprint Review the Product Owner presents a 14-slide status deck; nobody sees the working increment.

856 words, about 4 min 2

One Product Owner, two teams, 180 specifications

A single Product Owner supports two Scrum Teams (five Developers each) building an internal claims platform. The Product Backlog holds 180 items, most written as four-page specifications the Product Owner produces alone before refinement.

855 words, about 4 min 3

Priority by whoever shouted most recently

The Product Backlog holds 250 items. Order changes roughly three times per Sprint, each time after a call with whichever stakeholder complained most recently.

902 words, about 5 min 4

12% adoption and a dashboard for the sponsor

A logistics company bought a picking-and-scanning app for its 300 warehouse staff. The IT director who signed the contract is the only stakeholder who attends Sprint Review, and measures success by "the project being delivered on time"; the Product Owner's objectives are tied to the same measure.

859 words, about 4 min 5

Velocity up 38%, everything else down

A quarterly business review opens with the Product Owner's chart: velocity rose from 42 to 58 points per Sprint, a 38% improvement. Meanwhile, monthly customer-reported defects rose from 9 to 21; median time from an item being accepted into the backlog to production release is still 14 weeks; release cadence is unchanged at one per month; NPS fell from 31 to 27; and the share of backlog spend on new features fell as defect work grew.

872 words, about 4 min