Are there different CSPO certifications and how do they differ?

There are multiple product owner courses you can attend but only one CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) course.

The CSPO course has been developed and nurtured by the Scrum Alliance. It is internationally recognised and certified by the Scrum Alliance.

A CSPO course must be led by an experienced Certified Scrum Trainer.

A certification that takes multiple years to achieve and must be validated by a certification body and peer-reviewed before someone can qualify as a Certified Scrum Trainer.

A CST must also have great practical skills and experience within scrum environments.

Many competing product owner courses don’t have any criteria for someone to host the course.

Some frameworks, for example ‘SAFe’, only require that someone has attended a 5 day ‘train the trainer’ course in order to deliver the product owner course.

The quality of your training experience is largely dependent on the skills and expertise of your course trainer. It makes a significant difference when your trainer has years of experience working at the coal face and deeply understands the challenges and opportunities of the role.

Without that, it’s simply a matter of reading curriculum, which you could do in your own time and achieve the exact same result.

At Agile Centre, we focus on learning as a transformative experience.

The idea being that the knowledge and skills are embedded during your training, and you’ve had discussions around each of the concepts to ensure that you understand from multiple perspectives.

The tools, frameworks and models used to deliver the training are also hand-selected to help you within your role from day one. Tools that will help you succeed and structure your progression.

So, in summary. There are multiple product owner courses available. Some are certified and some are uncertified.

We advise that you research your trainer and understand whether they have deep expertise and experience at the coal face. Have they worked in scrum environments? Have they solved complex problems? Are they used to working with a team to solve complex problems?

If so, you are in good hands. If not, we would advise that you rethink the purpose of your training and invest in a certified training experience that helps you progress in your career development.

If you want to become a product owner, visit our Certified Scrum Product Owner course page as well as the Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner course page.

Frequently Asked Product Ownership Questions

Frequently Asked Product Owner Training Questions