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 where the right answer is unclear.

Practice questions (60)Free. Sign in to answer, so your result is kept and reported by module.
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 a candidate already knows the framework.
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 a candidate already knows Scrum and asks whether they can hold the Product Owner accountability when the situation is unclear. Roughly half the questions describe a case, often one where every option is defensible, and ask which choice does most for value. The Guide supplies the vocabulary of every question, and judgement decides the answer.

Evidence-Based Management is the largest single addition over PSPO I. Questions draw directly on the four Key Value Areas, on the goal structure that runs from a strategic ambition down to what a Scrum Team does this Sprint and on the discipline of treating each step as a hypothesis. The Evidence-Based Management Guide belongs on the reading list for this assessment.

The rest of the assessment tests the daily work of the accountability. Ordering under real constraints, forecasting honestly, saying no to a stakeholder senior enough to overrule the Product Owner, deciding whether a product should scale at all and knowing which measures are worth having. Preparation is mostly scenario practice, because most of the exam is built that way.

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: Cost of Delay, Opportunity Cost, LTV and CAC · Outcome and output · Product discovery and validating assumptions5 concepts
~25%02Business Strategy and Product VisionSetting a direction that holds up when the evidence arrives, 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 when they disagree with each other, 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 when several stakeholders have asked for different things, refining a Product Backlog item only as far as the Scrum Team needs 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 are the work of scaling 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