PM409
Agile Product Development
Faculty
Lisa Cooney
Agile Coach at Edward Jones
Course length
Duration
Total hours
Credits
Language
Course type
Fee for single course
Fee for degree students
Skills you’ll learn
Overview
Building great tech requires more than great product knowledge and management - it requires a deep understanding of Agile ways of working. “Being agile” is so much more than dev team practices, it is being mentally flexible and highly adaptable to constant change. In this class, students will learn how to navigate the jargon and use agile concepts to achieve terrific results with teams and organizations. In addition to learning about the frameworks scrum and kanban, we will review the philosophical principles behind why these frameworks can be useful, how to modify or recombine them, and how to be sensitive to the human psychology that makes it all work. Through a combination of lectures, small-group work, learning games, workshops, and projects (both structured and self-directed), students will learn to avoid the pitfalls and leverage Agile for their product and business success.
Learning highlights
- Describe an “Agile Mindset” and how it is relevant to product management.
- Define psychological safety, describe the conditions necessary for it, list some key indicators of its presence or absence, and explain why it is essential.
- Describe hybrid agile frameworks, models, and philosophies (such as SAFe, scrumban, etc.) and when each might be useful.
- Describe how a Kanban board and a product backlog function together to manage workflow.
- Describe the conditions under which team autonomy makes sense and when autonomy needs to be balanced with strong leadership.
- Give concrete examples of some cognitive biases and limiting beliefs and explain how to deal with them.
- Working with remote or hybrid teams.
Course outline
15 classes
AGILE
- Agile Mindset - What it is, competing definitions of it, what it is not, what it enables and why it matters.
- Backlog - What it is and how to create one (we will co-create a backlog of Agile topics to cover in this class using the tool Trello).
- Dot-voting - how to prioritize collaboratively with a group.
- Definition of Done - What this is and why you need it before you start.
SCRUM
- Scrum - What it is, how it works, and why everyone says they “follow scrum.”
- Scrum Team - What it is, how to adapt it, and how to form them (we will form our own pseudo-scrum teams using a team self-selection exercise later in the week).
KANBAN
- Kanban Board - What it is and why it helps?
- Kanban methodology - what it is, how it works?
- Flow – Metrics that support success with Kanban.
- Scrumban - a flexible blend of Scrum and Kanban that takes a cafeteria approach of using what works for a particular context.
TEAMS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
- Psychological Safety - what it is, how to know when you have it, what it feels like, and why it is important?
- Team Self-Selection – How to run a team self-selection exercise and why this makes such a big difference to product success.
- Team Agreements - What they are and how to run one (we will create our own).
RETROSPECTIVES AND AGILE ROLES
- Agile Roles – what they are now, what they are evolving to be, and why words matter.
- Retrospectives - what they are, and how to run one (we will run one on Week 1).
TRANSFORMATION AND SCALING
- Digital Transformation - Definition, goals, what changes (and what doesn’t).
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) - Broad overview, why it’s popular, pros and cons.
- Types of “transformation” - terminology, what it means in practice, alternatives.
AGILE METRICS
- Agile metrics - What makes a metric “agile” and what are we really measuring.
- Sprint Metrics - Velocity, capacity, burndowns, story point pros and cons .
- Delivery metrics - Cycle time and lead time.
ESTIMATION
- User stories - Format, methods for creating, sizing, estimating.
- Running experiments and fast feedback loops - Being open to learning, viewing mistakes at learning opportunities vs failures, getting feedback from users directly and making adjustments for the next iteration.
- Metrics and Scrum - measuring “agile” vs measuring value delivery.
TOOLS
- Types of tools - Categories of agile tooling and how to choose from among the many options.
- Tools - What are the main types, when to use which kind, pros and cons of some of them, how to know when a tool is controlling you (or your teams), and benefits and drawbacks of switching tools.
- Work tracking - pros and cons of methods and tools.
- Communication and Documentation - dispelling the myth that “agile” doesn't require documentation.
- AI - recent trends in using AI to enhance agility on teams and in organizations.
REMOTE WORK AND ITERATIVE DEVELOPMENT
- Working from anywhere - Remote work; Hybrid models; Value of being in-person vs. value of working where you want to; How to make any arrangement work out OK.
- Effective remote leadership - what people and teams need to thrive when working remotely.
- Iterative Communication - the impact of fast feedback loops on product quality.
BUSINESS AGILITY
- Business agility - What it is, trends in the field, doing more with less work.
- Agile product management - what this means, how to know if someone is managing a project with agility (or not)
AI/AGILE
- Large language models and agile - how far can we trust AI to help us learn and grow our agility?
- Agile for Life - Examples of agile practices and approaches applied in non-tech environments; personal agility.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
- Building an “agile” culture - what does this mean, how does it happen, how do you know when you have one?
THE BRAIN
- Limiting Beliefs - What they are and how to recognize and deal with them.
- Cognitive Bias - What it is, what you can do about it, and why it is important to understand it.
- Powerful Agility - Managing power dynamics
FINAL EXAM
- FINAL EXAM
Course materials
Books
Media
Prerequisites
Building your MVP
Sep 12 - Sep 30, 2022
Natthapong Sasasmit
Labs Manager at WeWork
Advanced Growth and Digital Strategy
Jan 09 - Jan 27, 2023
Alex Nechoroskovas
Founder&CEO at Revenue Atoms
Product Development and Delivery
Feb 20 - Mar 10, 2023
Aleksandr Simukovic
Senior Product Manager, Adjust
Product Discovery
Jan 30 - Feb 17, 2023
Aleksandr Simukovic
Senior Product Manager, Adjust
Methodology
The pedagogy for this class is drawn from the concepts of agile - MVP, iteration, frequent reprioritization, adaptation to change, self-organization, feedback loops. We’ll have a healthy balance between structure and exploration, guidance and freedom, principles and experimentation, curiosity and necessity.
While there are several core concepts we must cover, students will be able to explore what they are most curious about and choose topics to learn in depth. The sequence is less important than student engagement - several topics are unrelated, and thus, we can tackle them in the order that meets the needs of the students in the class.
The format for this class will include many teaching modalities: lectures, learning games, small-group and large-group discussions, workshops, activities, student presentations, homework (research and reading), and group projects.
Each day following the first class will begin with a quiz on the prior day's content and a brief discussion on how the class is going. As the class progresses, we will build up our "class backlog" of topics to cover. Sometimes I will decide what students need to learn next, but most of the time students will follow their curiosity and passions to explore topics collaboratively together. Therefore, the actual topics covered may not match the syllabus exactly. At the end of each day I will review the homework assignment and revise it if needed based on student feedback
Grading
Lisa Cooney is a co-author of Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile (2021) and editor of Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out (2019). As a prominent member of the international Agile community, Lisa has spoken at many conferences and meetups on topics such as Agile 2, Agile and Devops, Cognitive Bias, Power, and Developmental Feedback.
Lisa has served as an Agile coach in a wide variety of organizations including Edward Jones, Spotify, the Agile 2 Academy, Axios, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), and the Department of Homeland Security. She is certified in Agile coaching, culture assessment, facilitation, scrum, and SAFe (SA). Lisa has a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Wellesley College and a Masters Degree in Instructional Technology from the University of Virginia.
See full profileApply for this course
Agile Product Development
by Lisa Cooney
Total hours
45 Hours
Dates
Mar 17 - Apr 04, 2025
Fee for single course
€1500
Fee for degree students
€750
How to secure your spot
Complete the form below to kickstart your application
Schedule your Harbour.Space interview
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FAQ
Will I receive a certificate after completion?
Yes. Upon completion of the course, you will receive a certificate signed by the director of the program your course belonged to.
Do I need a visa?
This depends on your case. Please check with the Spanish or Thai consulate in your country of residence about visa requirements. We will do our part to provide you with the necessary documents, such as the Certificate of Enrollment.
Can I get a discount?
Yes. The easiest way to enroll in a course at a discounted price is to register for multiple courses. Registering for multiple courses will reduce the cost per individual course. Please ask the Admissions Office for more information about the other kinds of discounts we offer and what you can do to receive one.