Abstract
Collaboration can be a challenge, but it’s a game-changer for successful product development.
The Product Owner Collaboration Toolkit Workshop, led by Jenny Martin, equips you with practical techniques for every step of the product journey. Exploring real-life scenarios and examples throughout the product life cycle will provide valuable insights that resonate with your experiences and challenges.
Whether you’re defining the product or delivering it, you’ll have a toolkit of engaging methods to run workshops that bring your team and stakeholders closer. These techniques focus on bridging communication gaps and ensuring your work adds value.
By joining this workshop, you’re investing in yourself and your ability to collaborate effectively, harness a group’s collective intelligence, and drive successful product outcomes. You’ll learn the techniques and expertise to navigate the myriad of contextual factors at play so you can utilise your toolkit for the best results.
Here’s why you’ll benefit from this highly immersive and participative course:
- Strategic Toolkit Mastery: Gain practical techniques to foster collaboration, not just blindly apply them. Learn when and how to use these tools effectively, depending on your working context.
- Achieve Clear Goals Together: You’ll align with your team, engineers, and stakeholders, fostering autonomy and making decisions that drive results.
- Less Rework, More Customer Happiness: Effective collaboration ensures everyone understands the project, leading to happier customers and a smoother process.
- Unleash Creativity: Collaboration fuels innovation, allowing you to explore creative solutions you might not have considered otherwise.
- Be a Catalyst for Collaboration: This course empowers you to be an essential part of the team, acting as a catalyst for collaboration in your organisation.
Target audience
Are you an experienced Product Owner aware of the challenges that arise when it comes to collaboration among different teams and expertise?
By taking this workshop, product owners with an intermediate/advanced level of experience will gain the skills and confidence to expertly guide the product delivery process from start to finish, acting as a catalyst for collaboration in their organisation.
To get the most out of this course, it is recommended to have some experience in the product owner role (recommended two years+) so that participants can reflect on real examples and challenges.
Participants will leave with facilitation skills and workshop techniques that prepare them to make a huge impact by engaging teams, bridging communication gaps and accelerating the delivery of higher-quality products.
This workshop is also useful for:
- Agile Coaches
- Product Managers
- Anyone interested in levelling up their facilitation skills.
Program
The workshop is structured around the concepts of Product Delivery Process, Product Definition, Continuous Product Discovery and Iterative Delivery.
As we enter each phase, we will briefly revisit key concepts and best practices to give context to the collaborative techniques and practices that will be applied. There will be opportunities to share experiences and reflect on how these techniques can be applied to solve challenges and avoid typical product development pitfalls.
This workshop will not only provide you with a whole tool-kit of collaborative product development techniques, but it will also cover the principles behind designing and structuring effective workshops, so even if you are an experienced facilitator, you will come out of this workshop confident to design and run any workshop to solve challenges and get real work done.
You will learn how to facilitate a group so they all contribute to their fullest, leveraging the team’s collective intelligence.
In this workshop, we’ll address the following topics:
- Product and engineering teams working in silos, leading to misunderstandings and rework,
- Lack of confidence in facilitating collaborative sessions, leading to slow progress, unclear outcomes and disengaged stakeholders,
- Lack of confidence in the product team’s abilities, always being given solutions to deliver rather than problems to solve – leading to low morale and decreased productivity,
- Misaligned teams, where team members are not on the same page or don’t understand the bigger picture,
- Ineffective workshops that do not promote collaboration, communication, and problem-solving among team members,
- Challenges navigating the product delivery life-cycle, knowing when to collaborate, which approach to use and who to involve,
- Poor documentation and lack of understanding of customer problems, which leads to customer dissatisfaction.
Agenda
Module 1
By the end of Day 1, participants will clearly understand the benefits of collaboration, possess fundamental facilitation skills, and have learned collaborative techniques for product definition and visioning. They will have a toolkit of techniques aligning the team to a shared vision and purpose and a clear understanding of moving towards outcome-based goals and OKRs.
This session sets the foundation for the rest of the course, where participants will continue to build on these skills to enhance collaboration and deliver value throughout the product life-cycle.
Part 1 – All about collaboration – How to:
- Foster a culture of collaboration and inclusivity
- Structure, Design and Deliver any workshop for maximum impact
- Confidently facilitate a diverse group towards successful outcomes
- Maximise the collective intelligence of a group, ensuring that all participants contribute to their fullest
Part 2 – Product Definition – How to:
- Use engaging and immersive collaborative techniques to develop a powerful Product Vision.
- Shift thinking from ‘features’ to ‘outcomes’ and a mindset of ‘hunt the value’
- Explore Product Strategy from multiple angles and achieve strong alignment towards goals
Module 2
By the end of Day 2, participants will have gained the confidence to design and facilitate workshops using a variety of techniques that help them understand customer problems better, identify the most important opportunities to pursue, and how these techniques feed into the creation of an Outcome-based Product Roadmap.
Part 1 – Exploring Problems – How to:
- Apply the principles of Continuous Discovery to improve the viability and quality of decisions and keep with new opportunities and trends
- Get the most out of customer interviews
- Get your team to fall in love with the problem by deeply exploring the problem space together using a variety of engaging collaborative techniques
Part 2 – Prioritising Opportunities – How to:
- Explore and evaluate opportunities to maximise customer value
- Use engaging techniques to prioritise opportunities and gain alignment and consensus between stakeholders
- Plan horizons of value and measure success
Module 3
By the end of Day 3, participants will have acquired skills to explore and validate solutions and evaluate Product-Solution Fit collaboratively. These techniques help teams ensure that the proposed solutions effectively address customer problems and deliver value.
When teams are strongly aligned with the value proposition, they make better decisions.
Part 1 Exploring Solutions – How to:
- Align towards a clear, concise and compelling picture of your product or service and what makes it unique
- Harness collective intelligence to explore solutions
- Plan increments of value and visualise assumptions
Part 2 Validating Solutions – How to:
- Accelerate delivery by optimising the design process for feedback and learning.
- Extract and rank hypotheses to and design experiments collaboratively
- Use deliberate discovery to make better decisions about the product development approach, and choose the most useful practices and techniques for your team each time.
Module 4
By the end of Day 4, participants will have gained skills in fostering innovation and design thinking. They will have learned techniques for generating creative ideas and exploring innovative solutions. Additionally, participants will understand the Design Sprint methodology and its application in rapidly prototyping and validating ideas.
These skills are valuable for generating innovative solutions and driving product development forward.
Innovate and Design – How to:
- Achieve buy-in from key stakeholders on the benefits of running a Design Sprint
- Design a Design Sprint to achieve rapid accelerated progress in a short amount of time. Gain confidence in planning highly effective collaborative and innovative techniques to maximise engagement and productivity.
- Facilitate a Design Sprint with confidence to answer critical business questions and choose the right designs
- Avoid common pitfalls and challenges faced during a Design Sprint
- Leverage the critical components of a Design Sprint to customise collaboration to suit any environment and delivery approach.
Module 5
By the end of Day 5, participants will have gained skills in breaking work down and navigating complexity using the OOPSI method. This will help them align the team towards an MVP using an approach which optimises feedback and learning. They will also have learned techniques for specifying collaboratively using concrete examples, ensuring a clear and shared understanding of user story details and acceptance criteria.
These skills are essential for incrementally delivering value, maintaining a prioritized backlog, and fostering collaboration throughout product development.
Part 1 – Starting Small – How to:
- Quickly identify and focus on the most valuable work and align strongly with shared goals
- Guide teams to align their efforts with outcomes and make good decisions
- Navigate complexity and break work down using the OOPSI framework
- Use engaging techniques to hunt the 20% of the most valuable capabilities and gain consensus on priorities
Part 2 – Specifying Collaboratively – How to:
- Use concrete examples to achieve better-shared understanding and reduce rework.
- Collaborate with stakeholders throughout the delivery process
- Fully utilise the outputs of collaboration as structured living documentation
Learning objectives
This highly participatory workshop equips participants with the knowledge and techniques to accelerate product delivery, align teams towards a vision and purpose and build products that customers love.
The course covers all aspects of product delivery, from product vision and strategy, continuous discovery and design thinking, to iterative product development and validated learning.
After attending this workshop by Jenny Martin:
- You will have levelled up your facilitation and workshopping skills
- You will have access to a toolkit of techniques that you can draw on for years to come
- You will have the confidence to go back to your organisation and start to bridge gaps with business and development teams
- You will be able to express and demonstrate the case for collaboration.
Expect to get your hands dirty – How does it work
The workshop will be highly engaging, hands-on and fun.
Each topic will be introduced so that there will be a common ground for discussion and ensuring that most content is practical and hands-on.
Each collaborative technique will be practised on Miro, and participants will retain access to the templates to use and customise for their own workshops after the course. Participants will get lots of opportunities to practice the techniques, ask questions and share their experiences with the group. In some cases, participants will work together in small groups.
The workshop will keep its highly interactive and hands-on spirit despite being online.
This is why we require that all participants keep their webcam on for the whole workshop duration: this will enhance the quality of the communication and the workshop as a whole.
You won’t be sitting at your desk watching slides and videos, and you’ll be engaged in real-time activities for the majority of the time… as if we were in a real classroom!
