Sprint Zero

Your first day at Qafla

Pick the name your team will call you. Your progress stays in this browser, and you can save it to a file any time.

A nickname is enough. No email, no password.

NewThe AI meeting room

18 missions from real PO work and real interviews

Practise the decisions a Product Owner actually makes.

Sprint Zero drops you into Qafla, a fictional food-delivery startup, as its new PO. Your team messages you with real situations. You decide. They react. Your manager reviews every call, with the evidence behind it.

A nickname is enough. No email, no password.

  • Free
  • No account
  • Starts in a minute
Have a progress file or code? Restore it

Or paste a progress code:

Courses teach the framework. The job is the judgement.

You can memorise the Scrum Guide and still freeze when the CEO asks you to squeeze his feature into a running Sprint, when a dashboard drops for two reasons at once, or when a vendor contract quietly hands them your source code.

Those moments decide whether a team trusts its Product Owner. Sprint Zero lets you live them before they're real, get it wrong safely, and see exactly why.

1 in 3

ideas tested at Microsoft improved the metric they were built to improve. [7]

80%

of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. [8]

Anatomy of a mission

Scroll through one mission, the way you'll play it.

  1. 1

    A message lands.

    Lina from ops needs a "busy mode" today. Rami wants to know why conversion fell. Real requests, real pressure, mid-Sprint.

  2. 2

    You read the evidence.

  3. 3

    You make the call.

  4. 4

    Your manager reviews it.

New · Beta

Knowing the answer is half the job. Saying it is the other half.

In the Meeting room you chat live with a teammate played by AI. Each one wants something, and hides why. Ask the right questions, keep their trust, and leave with a deal you can actually deliver. Then Nour reviews how you handled it.

  • They hide the real reason.

    Rami's Friday deadline isn't really about Friday. You only find out if you ask.

  • Trust moves with every message.

    Lecture them and it drops. Listen and it climbs. The review shows exactly where you won them, or lost them.

  • Five meetings, Easy to Brutal.

    QA blocking a release, a tech lead who wants a rewrite, a vendor asking for more money, a CEO fresh out of a bad board meeting.

  • Then the reveal.

    After the review, see what they weren't telling you, and the line a strong PO would have opened with.

In beta, running on free AI: 3 meetings a day per player.

The Friday deadline

Rami Khoury, CEO

Trust67+12

  1. Saw the estimate. Three Sprints? I need live tracking by Friday.

  2. Before we talk dates: what has to happen on Friday?

  3. Fine. Friday we have an investor demo. They need to see one real order tracked live.

Graded the way a senior PO would grade you.

Every answer was rated in advance on five skills, with a written reason. Each skill has a rating that starts at 1000 and moves with the Elo system chess uses. Only your first attempt at a mission counts, so you can't memorise your way to the top.

Value
Protecting outcomes and the Product Goal
Stakeholders
Keeping trust while saying no
Team
Respecting the Developers and the Sprint
Scrum
Using the framework correctly
Evidence
Deciding with data
BestAcceptableRiskyHarmfulGradesSABC
Feedback from your managerQAF-301 · Conversion is falling

A

86%

Passed. First attempt: your ratings moved.

  • Evidence+24
  • Value+17
  • Stakeholders+9

8 sprints, one direction.

You always know the next step. A sprint opens when you've passed the one before it; a mission you miss comes back three days later as a review.

  1. Sprint 1

    Learn the room

    • Welcome to Qafla
    • "We need busy mode today"
    • The story nobody understands

  2. Sprint 2

    Own the backlog

    • Five requests, one Sprint
    • An epic that won't fit
    • Pick a strategy, then sort the backlog

  3. Sprint 3

    Read the numbers

    • Conversion is falling
    • Nobody uses your feature

  4. Sprint 4

    Run the business

    • The contract that doesn't fit
    • Our biggest partner wants a special feature

  5. Sprint 5

    Case studies

    • Case study: the +6% that wasn't
    • Case study: where the next $60k goes

  6. Sprint 6Long

    Live operations

    • Case: the iftar outage
    • Case: the batching backlash

  7. Sprint 7Long

    Strategy under pressure

    • Two developers down
    • Homs in six weeks

  8. Sprint 8Long

    Hard business calls

    • Twenty percent
    • Rewrite, replace or buy

Built on evidence, not opinion.

The feedback after every mission cites where the advice comes from. These are the sources behind the current missions.

  1. 1The Scrum Guide (2020)Schwaber & Sutherland
  2. 2INVEST in Good Stories (2003)Bill Wake
  3. 3RICE: Simple prioritization for product managersSean McBride, Intercom
  4. 4Five simple but powerful ways to split user stories (SPIDR)Mike Cohn
  5. 5Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)Scaled Agile
  6. 6Checkout usability researchBaymard Institute
  7. 7Online controlled experiments (ACM RecSys 2012)Kohavi et al., Microsoft
  8. 8The 2019 Feature Adoption ReportPendo
  9. 9Opportunity Solution TreesTeresa Torres
  10. 10Getting to Yes: principled negotiation and BATNAFisher & Ury, Harvard PON
  11. 11Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001)Agile Manifesto
  12. 12Diagnosing Sample Ratio Mismatch in Online Controlled Experiments (KDD 2019)Fabijan et al. (Microsoft, Booking.com)
  13. 13What is good retentionLenny Rachitsky & Casey Winters
  14. 14Managing IncidentsGoogle SRE book
  15. 15Postmortem Culture: Learning from FailureGoogle SRE book
  16. 16Strangler Fig ApplicationMartin Fowler

Who's building this

Mohammad Taleb

Mohammad Taleb

Aspiring Product Owner, building from Syria

LinkedInPortfolio

I'm building Sprint Zero while preparing for my own first Product Owner role. Courses taught me the frameworks, but I kept wishing I could practise the decisions before facing them for real. So I built the place I was looking for: real situations, honest feedback, and a source behind every piece of advice.

The goal for Sprint Zero

A free place where anyone, in Arabic or English, can practise product work before their first day on the job.

My own goal

To work as a Product Owner, grow into one whose calls a team trusts, and help the product community here grow with me. I'm practising every mission here too.

Feedback, a situation worth adding, or a PO role I'd fit? I'd love to hear from you on LinkedIn.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes.

Do I need an account?

No. Pick a nickname and start. Your progress is saved in this browser, and Settings gives you a progress code to move it to another device.

Is this a certification?

No. It's practice. Where it uses Scrum terms, it follows the Scrum Guide (2020).

Who is it for?

Aspiring and junior Product Owners preparing for interviews or a first role, and working POs who want to sharpen their judgement.

Is Qafla a real company?

No. Qafla and its team are fictional. The situations come from real Product Owner work and real interviews.

Can I use it in Arabic?

Yes, the whole app. Market terms like Sprint, backlog and stakeholder stay in English, as teams actually say them.

Where do my Meeting room messages go?

To the AI provider that plays the character, only to write the reply. Sprint Zero doesn't keep them, but the provider may under its own terms, so don't type real names, companies or private details.

Your first message is waiting.

Takes a nickname and about a minute to start.

A nickname is enough. No email, no password.