Scrum in Practice: For Scrum Masters & Product Owners
Signature Course No. 199 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Scrum in Practice: For Scrum Masters & Product Owners course, in the Leadership & Management category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Scrum is easy to describe and hard to run. The framework fits on a few pages: one team, three accountabilities, five events counting the Sprint itself, three artifacts, each with a commitment that keeps it honest. This course teaches the running of it — what to do on the Tuesday when the Sprint Review has drifted into a slide presentation nobody inspects, when the Product Owner is ordering the backlog by whoever shouted last, and when the team's forecast is a single date spoken with a confidence the numbers never earned.
The running team carries the whole course. Quayside Labs builds Docklight, a berth-booking and invoicing platform used by independent marinas, and its Scrum Team of seven people works in two-week Sprints. Its last six Sprints delivered 34, 38, 36, 40, 32, and 36 points — 216 in total, an average of 36 — and every forecast, capacity plan, and burndown in the course is computed from those figures and can be traced back to them. The firm, the product, and the people in this running case are fictional, invented for this course.
Module 1 — The Accountabilities and the Events. State what each accountability owns and what it must never absorb; write a Product Goal and a Sprint Goal that a stranger could use to judge a backlog and a Sprint; run Sprint Planning so it produces a goal, a forecast, and a plan rather than a filled board; facilitate a Daily Scrum that belongs to the Developers; run a Sprint Review in which stakeholders inspect a working Increment and the backlog changes because of what they saw; and facilitate a Sprint Retrospective that ends with one owned experiment instead of a list of complaints.
Module 2 — Honest Artifacts, Real Numbers, Hard Cases. Audit any team's three artifacts against their commitments; run refinement that splits, clarifies, and sizes without building a bureaucracy; estimate relatively and forecast a release as a range with its reasoning shown; run an impediment from first signal to removal, escalating ownership as the blocker demands; design a stakeholder compact that routes every kind of need to its proper event; rescue a failing event in the moment without stealing it; and name, evidence, and remedy the chronic anti-patterns that hollow a team's Scrum into ritual.
The framework, stated honestly. This course teaches Scrum as defined in The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, and every framework specific carries the framing in place: as defined in the Scrum Guide (2020); check the current version before relying on any specific. Story points and velocity are named as what they are — complementary practices the Guide does not define, useful when handled honestly, and never presented as rules of Scrum itself.
The boundaries are part of the course. This course is about running Scrum well in a real team, and it stays inside that job. It contains no examination practice and no preparation coaching of any kind. It does not teach flow metrics as a system; where a contrast with a flow-based approach sharpens a Scrum decision, the contrast is drawn in a paragraph and left there. And it does not teach any particular software tool for tracking work; the boards and backlogs in this course are described by what they must make visible, not by which buttons a vendor puts where.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — The Turnaround Plan, a turnaround plan for the running team's next Sprint, built from an audit of the two Sprints just ended; and The Forecast and the Compact, a release forecast and stakeholder compact for the product's next release, defended in writing. Each capstone is also run on your own ground — a live team you actually serve, own the product for, or work in now, with its real sprint data and real stakeholders.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
This is the one hundred and ninety-ninth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with what you actually bring. Scrum is easy to describe and hard to run; the accountabilities, the events, and the artifacts are simple to name and hard to carry on an ordinary Tuesday. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Turnaround Plan for Module 1 and The Forecast and the Compact for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
The accountabilities as daily work. The Product Owner on value, ordering, and the word no; the Scrum Master serving in three directions; the Developers owning their plan and their quality bar — each accountability stated by the decisions it must own and the ones it must never absorb.
The events at their purpose. Sprint Planning producing a goal, a forecast, and a plan; the Daily Scrum as the Developers' own inspection; the Sprint Review inspecting a working Increment with stakeholders; the Sprint Retrospective ending in one owned experiment — and each event rescued in the moment when it drifts.
The artifacts kept honest. The Product Goal, the Sprint Goal, and the Definition of Done audited as commitments a stranger can check, and refinement run as the craft that makes work arrive ready to build.
Numbers a stakeholder can plan on. Estimation kept relative, forecasting from the team's real delivery record in ranges with the reasoning shown, impediments removed rather than carried, and stakeholders routed so their needs inform the product without hijacking the Sprint.
What you will learn
- Carry the Scrum Master and Product Owner accountabilities as daily practice, and help Developers own theirs
- Run each Scrum event to its purpose — and rescue it, in the moment, when it drifts
- Keep the three artifacts transparent and their commitments — Product Goal, Sprint Goal, Definition of Done — honest
- Refine a Product Backlog into ordered, estimable, valuable work
- Estimate relatively and forecast from a team's real delivery numbers, as ranges with the reasoning shown
- Surface, escalate, and remove impediments instead of working around them forever
- Manage stakeholders so their needs inform the product without hijacking the Sprint
- Name the common anti-patterns, state the harm each one does, and apply its remedy
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Scrum in Practice: For Scrum Masters & Product Owners, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Turnaround Plan and The Forecast and the Compact
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people who run Scrum
Scrum Masters, new or experienced — who facilitate the events, coach the team, and carry the impediment work, and who need their interventions to be precise rather than theatrical.
Product Owners — who own value, ordering, and the hardest word in the job, no — and who need a backlog that expresses a product strategy instead of a queue of requests.
Developers and the managers and stakeholders around the team — Developers who own the Sprint Backlog, the plan, and the quality bar; and the managers and stakeholders who commission the work, attend the review, and fund the product, and who need to know what to ask for, what to inspect, and what never to demand. The course assumes you work in or alongside a team that uses, or is about to use, Scrum, and it assumes no certificate and no prior course.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Turnaround Plan
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Scrum in Practice: For Scrum Masters & Product Owners is Signature Course No. 199. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.