PSPO III
The Professional Scrum Product Owner III certification, commonly known as PSPO III, is Scrum.org’s most elite certification for Product Ownership.
Those awarded with it are certified:
- a distinguished level of Scrum Product Ownership Mastery
- a deep understanding of the Product Owner role in delivering value
- an understanding of how product vision, stakeholder engagement and the Product Backlog can be utilized to maximize value delivery
BASIC INFO
- Duration: 120 minutes
- Questions: 35; essay, multiple-choice, multi-select, true/false
- Passing score: 85%
- Number of certification holders: 300+
ABOUT THE QUESTIONS
Unlike the PSM III, the PSPO III is composed primarily of multiple-choice, multi-select, and true/false questions. Only a minority of the questions are essay questions, requiring you to write a text on your own. On my own PSPO III exam, out of 35 questions only 8 were essay questions, compared to 23 out of 30 on the PSM III exam.
The non-essay questions seemed not more difficult than those on the PSPO II exam. In fact, some of them appear to be coming from the same pool. The questions revolve primarily around the following areas:
- Product Backlog – what it’s for and how to utilize it best to maximize value delivery
- Scrum Events and the Product Owner’s role in them
- Relationship with the Developers and respective responsibilities
- General Scrum knowledge
The essay questions seem to be derived from a wide field, spanning question about one’s own practical experience, case studies, and purely theoretical questions.
The entire exam lasts 120 minutes, giving each question an average of at most minutes minus any potential loading times of your browser.
It is advisable to skip the essay questions in the first round, answering all non-essay questions until you are confident with them. This gives you a more realistic understanding of how much time you can spend on each essay question. For me, the first round answering all of the non-essay questions took around 30 minutes, giving me a comfortable 10 minutes for each essay question.
HOW TO PREPARE FOR PSPO III
Despite being a Level III exam, I personally found the exam much less challenging than, for example, PAL I. If you performed well on your PSPO II exam and take a while to prepare and contemplate about the role of the Product Owner, you should be able to pass the exam comfortably.
In order to prepare for the exam, you might want to consider the following:
- Revisit all the steps necessary to prepare for PSPO II
- Take a PSPO II class (again). Even if you passed your PSPO II exam, reiterating the material in a class and discussing aspects of the Product Owner position can be useful. If taking a PSPO II class for the first time, remember that it also gives you a $200 discount on your PSPO III exam.
- Thoroughly work through The Professional Product Owner. As with many books in the Scrum sphere, it can be used as a source for a first overview as well as for deeper study. Ultimately, the Product Owner is a value maximizer, so read every chapter guided by the question “how does the content in this chapter allow me as a Product Owner to maximize the value of my product”.
- Read up on the technique of User Story Mapping here.