On the Value of Product Owner Training

I love teaching Product Owner classes because the PO is in such a high-leverage role. The PO’s work affects the work of 7, 9, maybe even 18 other people. And it’s not difficult to triple the value delivered by a Scrum team, simply by improving their PO’s skills in a few key ways. Let’s look at the financial impact of that change…

The back of the napkin loaded cost for a Scrum software team in the US is about $1m per year. To be conservative, let’s assume that this team currently breaks even, producing about $1m in value for their organization each year. (Some teams are better. Many are worse and don’t even know it!)

With a CSPO class and two 2-day coaching sessions, I’m confident I can get that PO to improve sufficiently for their team to produce $3m in value per year, without the team having to get any faster. They’d just be more focused on smaller, high-value slices of work, getting better feedback more often to ensure value.

Counting time off work and direct costs (and being conservative again), we can assume the investment in those new PO skills was about $25k.

Thus, the year 1 ROI for the PO skill development is ($2m – $25k) / $25k or 7,900%. And, of course, it gets even better if you look at a longer time period because the skills continue to be useful.

I don’t know about you, but if I can turn $1 into $7,900, I’m going to do that every day, ten times before lunch!

Sign up for one of our public CSPO classes today or contact us about customized PO training and coaching for your organization. Or if you just want to tune up your slicing skills, join my 80/20 Product Ownership online course.

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