Product Digest

Professional Scrum Product Owner II

The advanced Product Owner credential from Scrum.org, assessed on applying Scrum, Evidence-Based Management and product strategy to situations rather than on recalling the framework.

Practice questions (60)Free, no account. One question per page with a worked explanation.
At a glance
Cost
$250 per attempt. Each additional attempt is charged separately.
Format
40 questions in 60 minutes. Multiple choice, multiple answer and true/false, with partial credit on some questions. Most are case studies that describe a situation and ask for the best course of action.
Pass mark
85%, which allows 6 incorrect answers out of 40.
Prerequisites
None formally. Scrum.org recommends holding PSPO I first, and the assessment assumes the framework is already known rather than testing it.
Renewal
The credential does not expire. There is no annual fee and no continuing education requirement.
Based on
The 2020 Scrum Guide, Scrum.org's Professional Scrum Competencies and the Evidence-Based Management Guide
What it covers

What it covers. PSPO II assumes you already know Scrum and asks whether you can act as a Product Owner when the situation is unclear. Roughly half the questions describe a case, often one where every option is defensible, and ask which does most for value. Recalling the Guide is necessary and is not what is being assessed.

Evidence-Based Management is the largest single addition over PSPO I. The four Key Value Areas, the goal structure that runs from a strategic ambition down to what a Scrum Team does this Sprint, and the discipline of treating each step as a hypothesis all appear directly. Reading the Evidence-Based Management Guide is not optional preparation.

The rest is the work of the accountability rather than its definition. Ordering under real constraints, forecasting honestly, saying no to a stakeholder who outranks you, deciding whether a product should scale at all, and knowing which measures are worth having. Preparation is mostly scenarios, because that is the whole exam.

The syllabus5 domains · free

Scrum.org’s own domains. Each opens its own page listing the concepts beneath it, and each concept has a page of its own.

01Product Value and Evidence-Based ManagementThe four Key Value Areas, the goal structure that turns a strategic ambition into work a Scrum Team can start, and the difference between measuring output and establishing value.Evidence-Based Management · Measuring value · Product economics · Outcome and output · Product discovery and validating assumptions5 concepts
~25%02Business Strategy and Product VisionSetting a direction that survives contact with evidence, connecting vision to the Product Goal, and choosing which opportunity to pursue when several are defensible.Product vision and what counts as a product · The business case and the Product Canvas · The Product Goal · Product roadmap and release plan · Product discovery and validating assumptions5 concepts
~20%03Stakeholders and CustomersWorking with stakeholders who disagree, holding the ordering decision under pressure, and distinguishing what a customer asks for from what they need.Stakeholders and collaboration · Stakeholder communications · The product owner in organisational context · Product discovery and validating assumptions4 concepts
~20%04Product Backlog Management and ForecastingOrdering by value rather than by request, refining enough and no further, and forecasting in a way that stays honest about what is unknown.The Product Backlog · Ordering the Product Backlog · Product Backlog refinement · Forecasting and release planning · The Product Goal5 concepts
~20%05Organisational Agility and ScalingWhat stays singular when a product runs across many teams, why dependencies rather than coordination are the work, and the organisational impediments a Product Owner has to name.Scaling Scrum · The product owner in organisational context · The Scrum Team · The Definition of Done4 concepts
~15%
Try a question

A colleague preparing for the assessment says the four Key Value Areas are defined in the Scrum Guide. How should this be corrected?

  • AThey appear in the Scrum Guide under the Product Owner accountability.
  • BThey are Scrum.org material published separately from the Scrum Guide, which deliberately does not say how value should be measured.
  • CThey replaced the Scrum Values in the 2020 revision of the Guide.
  • DThey are part of the Nexus framework rather than of Scrum.
60 questions across the 5 domains.

One per page, with a worked explanation.

Start the set