Certified CAPED Product Owner (CCPO)

A 7-person delivery team can easily cost $1.5-2 million per year and should be worth much more than that. The Product Owner’s job is maximizing the return on investment for that team. And that ROI should be continuous: every sprint, every quarter, every year.

That’s a hard job. It means learning and communicating what to build, who it’s for, and why it matters, in collaboration with the team and stakeholders. It means ensuring the team is consistently working on the most valuable work, at the right level of detail, given what is currently known. And it means organizing that work to resolve uncertainty before making expensive commitments.

Humanizing Work’s Certified CAPED Product Owner workshop teaches you how to do it.

The Product Owner role

People in this role often hold titles like Product Owner or Product Manager. The scope of the work is:

A product, service, or set of related capabilities
One or a few teams building it
Direct work with stakeholders and leaders

Just as important is what this role isn’t:

A backlog administrator or requirements writer who organizes other people’s requests
A delivery manager or team lead running execution (that’s the Certified CAPED Team Leader)
A strategic portfolio decision-maker setting direction across products

What you’ll learn to do

The CCPO workshop focuses on the Strategic Planning and Active Planning phases of CAPED: identifying complexity, running experiments to resolve uncertainty, and building a backlog that accounts for what you don’t yet know.

You’ll leave this 2-day workshop able to:

Understand how increasing complexity in work drives the need for a different way of working
Distinguish between complex work (needs experiments) and complicated work (needs analysis) using Cynefin
Understand customer needs through jobs, pains, and gains, not just feature requests
Map assumptions about customers, solutions, and feasibility to identify what’s complex and risky
Design focused probes using Feature Mining to test critical assumptions early while delivering real value
Work at three levels: Big Ideas, Minimum Marketable Features, and user stories
Split large features into small, testable stories using proven splitting patterns
Organize and visualize work using the PO Board model to keep teams focused on what matters

Like all Humanizing Work workshops, this one is highly interactive and hands-on. We won’t just talk about ideas and skills, we’ll practice them, using both carefully-crafted practice examples and your own real examples. Everything in the course is designed around how adults learn. (Hint: it’s definitely not from watching someone read PowerPoint slides to you.)

Who should attend

This workshop is for you if:

You’re a Product Owner or Product Manager on a struggling project and want to find your smartest next step fast
You have a big idea for a new product or project but you don’t know where to start
You’re making the transition from traditional product management to a complexity-aware approach
Your “Agile” has turned out to be waterfall with standups, and you sense something better is possible
Your stakeholders want commitments and your team wants room to learn, and you’re stuck between them
You just want to take your product ownership skills to the next level

Certification

Successfully completing the workshop and post-class exam earns you the Certified CAPED Product Owner (CCPO) designation.

Certified CAPED Product Owner (CCPO) is the successor to our popular CSPO course, updated to cover the skills and tools our most successful clients use to deliver high-value, complex initiatives. We focus less on Scrum and more on shaping complex work.

Bring this workshop to your organization

Most of our training is private, tailored to your organization, offered in-person or live online using Zoom and Miro. We’ll fit the examples and emphasis to your context, and your Product Owners will leave with shared skills and vocabulary ready to use right away on your current initiatives.