Passing the PSU I assessment with 100% — a retrospective
What worked for me when learning for Professional Scrum with User Experience
Bragging about certifications is pointless — use your experience to help others. That said, now first comes the learning material that I used to learn and can recommend from my own experience, followed by my own story.
Professional Scrum with User Experience I learning material
In a nutshell (90–95% of the work):
- Have a solid knowledge of Scrum (at the level of PSM I or PSPO I).
- Know the content of the book „Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams“ (3rd edition!) by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.
How to get there:
- scum.org’s Suggested Reading for Professional Scrum with User Experience is an excellent list of materials.
- 2nd opinion: Simon Kneafsey: How To Pass The Professional Scrum With User Experience (PSU I) Assessment From Scrum.org
The Scrum knowledge needed
- The Scrum Guide — the #1 document to know, available in >30 languages
- The Scrum Glossary
- Practice your knowledge with the Scrum Open and the Product Owner Open. Please note:
- The Scrum questions from the real exam will be harder!
- Indicator of learning progress: Do the Product Owner Open in less than 2 minutes with 100% right at least once every day.
The Lean UX knowledge needed
- Read the Lean UX book, 3rd edition from 2021.
- The video “Intro to Professional Scrum with User Experience PSU Training Course” including both authors also serves as motivation and overview.
- The blog post section of scum.org’s Suggested Reading for Professional Scrum with User Experience can deliver the last 5–10% of the learning.
- Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development by Jeff Gothelf (alternative URL) is mentioned in the articles and a good read.
- Sjoerd Nijland’s 12-part series Scrum & Lean UX is a good last check.
Two helpful diagrams
(Instead of copying or deep-linking the pictures, I rather mention the sources.)
The picture in this article is also featured in the book, but the yellow stickies are not that easily readable: Here is how UX Design Integrates with Agile and Scrum
Jeff Patton’s article “Dual Track Development is not Duel Track” (also listed under “Suggested Reading”) contains a visualization of “Dual Track” that is much better than the one used in the Lean UX book.
Beyond the assessment
- Jeff Gothelf explains in a video what’s new in the 3rd edition of Lean UX.
- Get the Lean UX Canvas as a PDF from.
- The outcome-based Product Roadmap is something I keep showing to people.
- The book “Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously” from the same authors — on scrum.org’s Agile Leadership and Product Owner learning paths
- Objectives & Key Results (OKR) (which have a clear relationship to both books) — see Felipe Castro’s guide (PDF) for a start
- The book “Continuous Discovery Habits” by Teresa Torres
About the exam and the learning process
Of all long-term beginner and intermediate assessments from scrum.org, this is the one with the least people certified. (As of 1st of December 2021, the date of my assessment, it was 1,734 people.) Perhaps this is related to the fact that there is no open assessment specifically for PSU I, the Product Owner Open and the Scrum Open being the best proxy ones. This was the first assessment for which I specifically read a book to prepare. The good news is that this plus the Scrum knowledge is almost everything it takes to learn for it.
For those starting with a solid Scrum background knowledge and being new to User Experience, do not let some false friends or other unclarities stand in the way of your learning progress:
- Design Sprints are not the anti-pattern of a Sprint in Scrum specialized about only one part of the value creation but a week-long activity as explained in the book “Sprint!”.
- The term dual-track Agile can be misunderstood as one team doing Discovery and another one doing Delivery. Do not get confused by that; Jeff Patton got a good visualization mentioned earlier that gets it right.
- Lean UX distinguishes between “incremental” versus “iterative” development; “incremental” being bad as it is only adding new stuff on top. The Scrum Guide itself describes Scrum as an “iterative, incremental approach”, thus going for both instead of one over the other.
- Lean UX has nothing to do with Lean Manufacturing. Instead, it is exactly going away from considering Software Development being like work at a manufacturing belt.
- Although the the book describes the psychological mistake of keeping investing in a failing idea “because so much money has already been spent”, the name of the phenomenon — Sunk Cost Fallacy — is never mentioned literally.
- The Scrum Guide explicitly mentions that the Scrum Team is “responsible for all product-related activities” and lists experimentation and research. The idea that Design or Product Discovery would, by default, not be an equal part of a Scrum Team’s activity, cannot be attributed to the Scrum Guide itself.
The book “Sense & Respond” is not necessary to pass the assessment. It can be considered as the sibling of the Lean UX book that can be given to managers.
The story behind the 100%
If you have read so far, congratulations. I will tell more about my personal journey and before and after the exam.
Yes, I did it again: After passing the Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) assessment with 100%, I pulled off another exam with a perfect score.
According to the authors of Lean UX, success is about creating positive change in the behavior of people. For a couple of years, I had a hard time reading work-related books. I needed months to finish them. While I had had very positive experiences working with designers. I did not think that I would be the right person to learn about Scrum with User Experience.
What changed my behavior? In late 2021, I was on my way out of the office walking through an empty corridor. I saw a couple of posters at the wall explaining some User Experience fundamentals. They were the work of a colleague with whom I had worked together and who had left the company. I realized that as a change agent, I always motivated people to change themselves, but in that moment I wondered how much I was living up to that standard. I had acknowledged that the topic was important and fascinating, and yet, until now, I had shied away from really learning about it. I reminded myself to ask: “If I had to die now, what would I regret that I have never done?” Going for this learning experience was one of the answers. I wanted to stay credible to myself.
As several years have passed since I took the exam, I can tell of some side effects:
- I have a lot more appreciation for designers and like the idea of “one designer per team” and “one researcher per team”.
- How I talk to designers changed forever. When I get to know a new designer, there is a kind of warmth and familiarity, even though we have different backgrounds.
- “What is the smallest thing we could build to find out more?” has become one of my standard questions when trying to break down work items into smaller and still valuable pieces.
- In hindsight, the PSU I exam served as a door opener to the other intermediate exams of scrum.org.
- I have found a way to read work-related books and finish them within a reasonable time span. The genie would never go back into the bottle. When I read the book “Continuous Discovery Habits” this year, it felt like home to me.
Closing words
Thanks to Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden for their books and talks! The learning experience brought me back to the original idea of a software developer that I learned more than 25 years ago in my first year at university. It is deeply fulfilling to experience how some ideals never die.
It is a shame to see that many Scrum Teams are treated like workers at a manufacturing belt in a feature factory, the very thing Agile was supposed to get rid of!
J.B.O.: Van Halian Harmonists: Jump
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