HOW TO PREPARE FOR PSU

PSU I is a difficult exam to prepare for, as there is little material out about the exam. Unlike many other exams, there is no corresponding Open Assessment, and unlike for PSK and PAL-EBM there is no explicit document that is being referred to.

In my experience, the PSU course and the PSU exams can be seen as additional qualifications for Product Owners much more so than, e.g., for Scrum Masters. The largest part of the course and the subsequent certification deal with understanding how to use an experimental approach to developing a product that the users consider valuable.

To prepare for the exam, the following actions are recommended:

• Read the Scrum Guide multiple times until you are confident in your understanding of its terminology and the concepts it describes. Special focus should be placed on the roles, artifacts, and events. For assistance in understanding the Scrum Guide, my book may be helpful.
• If you are new to Scrum, take the free Scrum Open assessment until you can pass it with a perfect score three times in a row, using less than 10 minutes each time.
• Take the same approach for the Product Owner Open.
• Read up on the following UX terminology:
  • The difference between UI and UX
  • Personas
  • Proto-Personas
  • Wireframes and Mockups
  • Prototype and MVP
• Keep in mind that in a complex environment, we cannot predict with certainty what will happen, so we need to take an empirical approach, i.e. create a hypothesis and verify or falsify it via an experiment.