IIBA CPOA Certification Exam Syllabus

Apply Foundational Concepts - 10%

1. Define Key Product Disciplines:

• General Awareness: Understands how to call attention to challenges in organizational structuring of product roles and functions.
• General Awareness: Understands how to identify issues organizational leaders need to discuss and address.
• General Awareness: Understands promoting the use of a product lifecycle approach from conception to retirement.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of assisting with identifying organizational processes that support the full product lifecycle.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of assisting with steering organizational discussions to clarify the functional units or roles that support each component of the product lifecycle.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of assisting with integrating product management, product ownership, and product marketing practices to address gaps and resolve conflicts.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of assisting with communicating responsibilities to ensure shared understanding.

2. Align Products to Strategy:

• General Awareness: Understands the organization's business strategy which drives the rationale for the initiative.
• General Awareness: Understands aligning work products and tasks across strategy, initiative and delivery horizons.
• General Awareness: Understands sharing information across feedback loops to allow for better decision-making.
• General Awareness: Understands how the product may impact multiple initiatives.

3. Align Artefacts:

• General Awareness: Understands how to identify artefacts, with other functional areas, that describe the product being built ensuring they cover the entire product lifecycle.
• General Awareness: Understands describing how artefacts will be used and why they are important to influence leaders to adopt them.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in gaining agreement on where each artifact aligns with the product lifecycle.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in developing a Roles and Permissions Matrix, (e.g., a RACI) to identify responsibilities for artefacts.
• General Awareness: Understands determining how a product owner will use each artefact to communicate and engage key stakeholders during product build activities.

1. Structure the Work:

• General Awareness: Understands identifying the team structure and locations to effectively work within its context.
• General Awareness: Understands promoting and supporting the use of effective analysis practices.
• General Awareness: Understands how to determine the scope of responsibility of the POA practitioner to enable effective product delivery.
• General Awareness: Understands how to customize communication and collaboration strategies to effectively support the team.

2. Drive Success:

• General Awareness: Understands how to identify opportunities to delight customers by understanding their challenges and their aspirations.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in clarifying the most important customer needs that the product needs to satisfy.
• General Awareness: Understands how to identify and engage key customers and stakeholders during product build to ensure ongoing alignment as the design emerges and the product evolves.
• General Awareness: Understands determining how the customer perceives value to best deliver that value.
• General Awareness: Understands how to identify organizational goals and objectives and ensures they are met.
• General Awareness: Understands implementing ongoing touchpoints with customers to maximize opportunities to learn what customers really need.
• General Awareness: Understands directing the focus on maximizing the value while optimizing the work.

3. Expand Product Owner Role:

• General Awareness: Understands how to build deep empathy for customers and understands their struggles, challenges, and opportunities.
• General Awareness: Understands interacting with the emerging product as the customer would.
• General Awareness: Understands socializing the emerging product with key stakeholders, particularly customers.
• General Awareness: Understands assessing and sharing feedback with the team.
• General Awareness: Understands determining if the product evolution will have the intended impact and decides the changes that are needed on a regular basis.
• General Awareness: Understands assessing sources of learning including the competitive environment, government regulations, customer expectations, new technology, and predictive and prescriptive modelling.
• General Awareness: Understands determining what to build next, features to add, and modifications to make to what was already built.

Cultivate Customer Intimacy - 15%

1. Get Personal:

• General Awareness: Understands establishing personal relationships with customers by adopting values of trust, respect, empathy, appreciation, communication and commitment when interacting with them.

2. Build Empathy:

• General Awareness: Understands establishing trust and safety with the customer through personal connections and demonstrating sincere interest in them.
• General Awareness: Understands establishing creative and perceptive questions for deeper understanding of customer needs.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in clarifying assumptions with stakeholders.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in utilizing the root cause analysis technique to get deeper answers.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in clarifying the meaning of words that can be understood in different ways.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in questioning non-verbal cues like body language if they do not match up with spoken words.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules in responding with compassionate understanding.

3. Engage in Observation:

• General Awareness: Understands observing customers in action to gain perspective on their process, product performance, and to reveal value-add opportunities.
• General Awareness: Understands employing both passive and active observation to gain insights.

1. Validate Problems:

• General Awareness: Understands applying problem identification and analysis techniques, and knowledge about the customers to analyze the problem.

2. Integrate Learnings:

• General Awareness: Understands engaging in activities to cultivate customer intimacy and articulate their problems.
• General Awareness: Understands utilizing intelligent learning to evaluate ideas.
• General Awareness: Understands how to facilitate a culture that integrates customer-driven intelligent learning.

3. Evaluate & Evolve Product:

• General Awareness: Understands assessing the product's value to customers to determine whether to move forward as planned, to change the approach, or to not move forward as is.

Engage the Whole Team - 15%

1. Share Vision

• General Awareness: Understands the varied perspectives and interests of customers, the delivery team and other stakeholders.
• General Awareness: Understands defining and advocating a collective vision with the buy-in from customers and the product team.
• General Awareness: Understands guiding the team to ensure it shares in the understanding of the customer and why the product is being built.

2. Collective Responsibility:

• General Awareness: Understands promoting and supporting collective responsibility for product success.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of managing strong, ongoing working relationships with all stakeholders including those involved on an infrequent, as-needed basis.

3. Align Product:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of utilizing the product vision to inspire and motivate the delivery team's work.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of utilizing the product roadmap to visualize planning and track progress of vision goals.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of utilizing release planning to demonstrate features contributing to the vision and goals.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of setting iteration goals that are aligned.
• General Awareness: Understands identifying a ready product backlog.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules when conducting Daily Stand-ups to inform on progress, raise awareness of obstacles and decisions that are needed and demonstrate partnership and commitment to the team.

1. Provide Psychological Safety:

• General Awareness: Understands promoting and instilling values and principles within the whole team.
• General Awareness: Understands building a safe environment for the team members to express opinions.

2. Analyze Stakeholder:

• General Awareness: Understands conducting Stakeholder Analysis early in the product delivery process.
• General Awareness: Understands assessing the Stakeholder Analysis continually as the work progresses.

3. Engage Stakeholder:

• General Awareness: Understands communicating the Product Vision and building a shared understanding.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge assisting in engaging the delivery team with customers and other stakeholders.
• General Awareness: Understands influencing others to support the vision.
• General Awareness: Understands contributing to the negotiation of priorities.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of facilitating collaborative agreement on product outcomes.

Make an Impact - 15%

1. Target Customers:

• General Awareness: Understands identifying the right customer groups for the product and aligning the product to their needs.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of developing personas and, customer journey and empathy maps.
• General Awareness: Understands determining customer groupings by integrating personas and, customer journey and empathy maps with intelligent learning.

2. Assess Product-Market Fit:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of leading collaborative conversations with the team and stakeholders in the development and ongoing revisions to the Product-Market Fit artefact.

3. Define Value Proposition:

• General Awareness: Understands how to determine with customers their understanding and value of the product.

1. Define Product Strategy:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of facilitating stakeholders to collaboratively develop an empirical product strategy.
• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules utilizing a Product Roadmap to focus the team on goals, benefits and demonstrations of value.

2. Integrate Across Initiatives:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of engaging team members to contribute to the success of each integrated initiative.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of navigating the communication and engagement to enable cross coordination of team member efforts.

3. Cultivate Organizational Support:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of managing and using the stakeholder map to effectively communicate with enterprise stakeholders.
• General Awareness: Understands identifying signs of misunderstanding, or misalignment, and addressing concerns with transparency and authenticity.
• General Awareness: Understands how the product will contribute to organizational strategy.
• General Awareness: Understands championing the product throughout the organization.
• General Awareness: Understands how to seek guidance, insights, and answers to questions, from others in the organization to understand and to inspire.

Deliver Often - 15%

1. Manage Product Backlog:

• General Awareness: Understands managing the product backlog.

2. Minimal Viable Product Builds

• General Awareness: Understands utilizing people, processes, and technology to elicit and analyze information to find the right fit to deliver thoughtful calculated MVP builds.

3. Plan Releases:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of preparing for and planning releases.
• General Awareness: Understands identifying areas of influence needed to support the design and execution of the release plan.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge communicating at all levels to ensure collaborative release planning.

1. Plan Iteration:

• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules to update the level of detail needed in the acceptance criteria to get the PBI to a Ready state.
• General Awareness: Understands how to answer clarification questions during iteration planning meetings.

2. Build Product Features:

• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules to refine the product backlog to prepare for future iterations.
• General Awareness: Understands clarifying any questions from team members.
• General Awareness: Understands communicating with customers about the product changes.
• General Awareness: Understands participating in PBI reviews.
• General Awareness: Understands preparing for upcoming iteration reviews.

3. Validate Product Features:

• General Awareness: Understands reviewing the PBI when the team sets the status of the PBI to done.
• General Awareness: Understands supporting the facilitation of the iteration review ceremony at the end of the iteration.

Learn Fast - 15%

1. Measure Strategy:

• General Awareness: Understands analyzing strategic measures to continuously align the performance of the product and determine how the product strategy changes.

2. Measure Product:

• General Awareness: Understands analyzing product measures to fine-tune features and transactional experiences and, design to maximize value delivered to customers.

3. Measure Delivery:

• General Awareness: Understands analyzing delivery measures to conduct a retrospective on the product backlog management process and evaluate the product team’s performance.

1. Assess Strategy:

• General Awareness: Understands identifying insights from the strategic assessment that provide indicators for business goals.

2. Assess Market:

• General Awareness: Understands assessing continuously how the delivered product is providing customer value from insights using multiple metrics.

3. Assess Delivery:

• Practical Knowledge: Follows Rules to assess periodically whether delivery goals are being met.

Obsess About Value - 15%

1. Assess Strategic Alignment:

• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge assessing multiple options and features that may provide value that resonates with the business objectives.

2. Assess Market Alignment:

• General Awareness: Understands applying various assessment techniques, and best practices, to understand the customer needs, and that outline the features, that provide customer value.

3. Assess Financial Viability:

• General Awareness: Understands the financial goals and objectives of the organization that are set for the product.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of assessing financial goals and objectives to determine if new features or modifications to the product can be met or, to limit the value delivered through the product or service.

1. Assess Capability:

• General Awareness: Understands providing product and domain context to the product team.
• General Awareness: Understands analyzing product team recommendations.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge of influencing resourcing processes to uplift the team's capability and maturity.

2. Optimize Process:

• General Awareness: Understands anticipating and accepting the changes.
• General Awareness: Basic Knowledge optimizing product strategy, roadmap and backlog to react to any changes quickly.

3. Leverage Technology:

• General Awareness: Understands utilizing technology to improve product owner's and product team’s efficiency to create a faster turnaround.