Two cohorts complete, 52 executives certified as CSPOs, on the way to 100 across four cohorts. Chunghwa Telecom is moving Scrum from team agility into the executive product decision layer.
When companies adopt agile, the first thing anyone notices is the teams.
Daily standups, Sprints, kanban boards, delivery speed — all of it matters. But in a large enterprise, what really determines how far agile goes is rarely how fast the teams run. It is whether senior executives can make product trade-offs in the same language. Team speed can be trained. A distorted sense of direction gets no second chance.
In my first CSPO recommendation letter to Chunghwa Telecom’s president in 2025, I used a simple analogy:
CSM is the sports car engine that makes an organization faster. CSPO is the navigation system that helps executives decide where to go.
A large enterprise cannot run on speed alone. It needs direction.
On the afternoon of July 4, 2026, the second cohort — 24 executives — passed their certification, bringing the total to 52 CSPOs. As everyone gathered behind the red banner in front of headquarters for the group photo, I looked up at the LED ticker over the entrance. Six characters happened to scroll by: create value, commit, be accountable.
Honestly, my first thought in that moment was — this company wrote the Product Owner mindset on its building years ago. What it is doing now is giving that mindset a shared, operational language.
That is the real meaning of Chunghwa Telecom’s push to certify one hundred executives as CSPOs. It is not the completion of a course. It is a large enterprise starting to move Scrum from a team execution language into an executive product governance language.
From Doing Things Right to Doing the Right Things
CSM helps teams learn how to do things right.
CSPO asks a harder question: were the things we chose to do right in the first place?
For a large enterprise, that question matters more than any method. Senior executives do not face single tasks. They face trade-offs across multiple business groups, product lines, stakeholders, and finite resources.
Without a shared product value language, every department can work hard while the company quietly drifts in different directions.
The value of CSPO for executives is not turning them into frontline Product Owners. It is helping them make decisions through product value, customer outcomes, and strategic sequencing.
Put differently: for executives, CSPO is not a Product Owner certificate. It is a shared language for enterprise product governance.
Not a Single-Unit Training, but Shared Learning Across Decision Nodes
What makes Chunghwa Telecom’s CSPO initiative unusual is not just the headcount.
It is the breadth of units and the seniority of the participants.
The participants span headquarters, multiple subsidiaries, operations units, technology units, research units, and key functional units. The levels range from senior executives and business unit heads to operations leaders, functional leaders, and the executive succession pipeline.
This is not one department’s training program, and it is not a local experiment by a single unit.
It is a shared-language build-out across headquarters, subsidiaries, business groups, and product decision nodes.
That is why I believe this case deserves the global Scrum community’s attention.
Most enterprise agile adoptions still live at the team level, the project level, or inside the IT department. Chunghwa Telecom took the opposite route: build the shared product governance language at the executive level first, then let that language spread outward through the organization.
Two Cohorts, 52 Executives — What Matters Is Governance Density
Four cohorts planned, targeting 100. Two cohorts complete, 52 executives certified.
I have coached executives across many industries, and getting 52 senior leaders of one company into the same CSPO classroom is a rare governance event anywhere in the global agile community. But what really matters is not the number. It is governance density.
When only a handful of executives in a company understand CSPO, it is an individual capability.
When 52 — and eventually 100 — executives share an understanding of product value, sequencing, customer outcomes, and cross-functional collaboration, it starts becoming an organizational language.
When all four cohorts are complete and 100 executives hold the CSPO, that will not mean 100 certificates. It will mean 100 product decision nodes running on one value language.
For a large enterprise, this is everything.
Every executive decision can shift resource allocation, product direction, cross-functional collaboration, and future competitiveness.
Only when those decision nodes gradually share one language does agile get the chance to grow from a team method into an enterprise governance capability.
Not Teaching Scrum — Designing Decision Stress Tests
A CSPO program for this audience cannot just teach Scrum vocabulary.
If executives merely learn what Product Backlog, Sprint, and Stakeholder mean, the value is limited.
The real value is bringing the enterprise’s actual product trade-offs into the classroom, and letting executives practice — in a safe but real arena — how to face the pull between different positions, different KPIs, different business groups, and different customer values.
So the core of the program design is not knowledge transfer. It is decision stress testing.
The cases covered points-based ecosystems, enterprise pricing, international network services, mobile services, and computing power services — topics that cut across business groups. Together they point to one thing:
At Chunghwa Telecom, product decisions are not something any single department can make alone.
They involve the integration of market, customers, technology, operations, platforms, institutional rules, and overall corporate strategy.
These problems are not solved by process. They are solved by getting the leaders to one table, arguing it out in one value language.
This is the real value of CSPO at the executive level:
Scrum stops being a classroom framework and becomes the shared language executives use to discuss product choices, sequencing, and governance.
Executives Learning Together Is a Leadership Signal
Another important signal: these executives were not sent to a course. The most senior leaders of the business units personally led their teams into the classroom.
That matters enormously.
In a large enterprise, whether leaders are willing to learn together often matters more than the course content itself.
Because learning together does not create identical knowledge — it creates an identical way of discussing.
The value of executives taking the course together is not that everyone hears the same terminology at the same time. It is that the next time a hard trade-off arrives, they can return to the same language.
I will be honest: in all my years of enterprise coaching, I rarely see this. During the two days of exercises, vice presidents debated a product sequencing decision with such intensity that when the session ended, they were still gathered around the whiteboard. That is not a class. That is a group of decision-makers choosing to see the same thing clearly, together.
That is what executive CSPO means.
It does not turn executives into Product Owners on Scrum teams. It equips them, at a higher level, with product governance, value sequencing, and cross-functional integration.
From Certificates to an Enterprise Capability Asset
When all four cohorts finish and 100 executives hold the CSPO, that is not the end of a course. It is the formation of an enterprise-level capability asset.
Mature talent development is not measured by course completion rates alone, but by whether the capability can be preserved, sustained, and institutionalized.
Certification renewal looks like an administrative issue. It is actually a question of whether the organization is willing to preserve its shared language for the long term.
If this group’s shared product language simply evaporates in two years, the company loses more than certificates. It loses a hard-won executive consensus.
That is why bringing CSPO into the company’s certification management and renewal system is not a subsidy. It is the institutionalization of a product decision capability.
A course ends.
But a shared language, preserved by institutions, becomes an asset for continuous transformation.
The Next Growth of Scrum Is at the Executive Table
What this case offers the global Scrum community is not just that a major Taiwanese enterprise is training one hundred executives.
What matters is that it demonstrates how Scrum moves from team-level agility to executive product governance.
Historically, Scrum’s home field has been the team: how to collaborate, how to deliver, how to improve continuously.
But in the era of AI, platforms, and cross-functional innovation, the next growth of Scrum may not be more teams learning to Sprint. It may be more executives learning to make decisions in the language of product value.
Chunghwa Telecom’s journey — from headquarters to core units, from senior executives to the succession pipeline, from a course to an institution — offers an answer worth the global agile community’s attention:
The next battleground of agile is not the team execution layer. It is the executive product decision layer.
And the next value of CSPO is not producing more Product Owners. It is helping more executives build a shared language for product governance.
That is why Chunghwa Telecom deserves to be seen by the world.
And it is a new paradigm Taiwan’s agile community can offer it.
Appendix: What the Executives Said
VP Chiu, Kaohsiung Operations Office, Chunghwa Telecom
Over these two intensive days, we absorbed a great deal of professional agile methodology and practical technique. For me, though, the core value of learning is not classroom understanding — it is bringing this back to the organization and actually putting it to use. Only then do the real benefits of agile management show up.
I hope every leader and colleague here will work together to bring this excellent agile framework and mindset into our respective business units, step by step. If we land it well, the company’s overall project momentum and performance will keep climbing.
As we roll this out, I also encourage open, cross-departmental exchange and generous sharing of experience. Any management tool improves with practice. Only by trying and applying it in real work can we make the process more operational, more fitted to our daily business, and more second nature.
VP Huang, Hsinchu Operations Office, Chunghwa Telecom
This CSPO training was deeply rewarding for me. In recent years I have sat in many large cross-organizational project meetings under a traditional project management framework, and throughout these two days I kept asking myself: how exactly should our traditional model hook into and adjust to agile thinking?
Everyone knows Chunghwa Telecom has a deep corporate culture and established processes; bringing agile into project management for real will not happen overnight. In this course I picked up practical tools like incremental management and the slicing and reallocation of business value. But to truly internalize these ideas, I will need to study the thinking behind them further after class, including through books, to refine and correct my own management approach.
My responsibilities now extend to the front line, and I genuinely hope to land this agile system there. Frontline operations involve many sprawling systems and functions, and slicing them precisely with agile tools is a real-world challenge for us. The ideal agile architecture will certainly need local adaptation in practice, but I will do my best to try it in the field.
Senior Manager Huang, Chairman’s Office, Chunghwa Telecom
It has been a long time since I took on a professional certification exam. After these two days, I deeply appreciate the substance behind this certificate — this is not a course you can coast through, and both the assessment and the hands-on work are genuinely demanding. I am grateful the company gave us this opportunity.
Looking from the Chairman’s vantage point, if the company can develop 100 leaders with CSPO thinking, the impact on the organization will be profound. I believe it will significantly raise the tempo of the company’s business execution, and more importantly, help teams focus precisely on what serves our strategic goals. Facing complex business demands, if leaders can distinguish what is urgent from what is important — and have the courage to make trade-offs at critical moments — it matters enormously for both product development and organizational efficiency.
For me personally, it was an honor to work alongside such outstanding colleagues from across the company. My hands-on experience may not match the veterans in the room, but between the knowledge Roger taught and the collaboration skills practiced in the workshops, I gained a great deal. I hope we will all put this agile mindset to work in our daily jobs, and I look forward to applying what I learned in the business ahead.
Senior Manager Chou, Business Administration Office, Chunghwa Telecom
I feel honored to have participated in this training.
Over two intensive days of coursework and exercises, working closely with all my partners here, I had a rare and valuable learning experience. The course delivered solid professional knowledge, but what I treasure even more is the hands-on experience of solving problems together as a team, and the chance to build this shared journey with outstanding colleagues from different units.
Finally, I want to thank Roger for the care he put into these two days — from the overall flow of the course to the practical case exercises, and for the professional guidance he gave us at every step. We will work to apply what we learned in our daily work.
Section Chief Lin, Corporate Communications Office, Chunghwa Telecom
Of all the many training courses I have attended, I would call Roger’s teaching itself a flawless demonstration of agile practice. He guided us through the exercises with rhythm, order, and a strong goal orientation, so we advanced efficiently within the schedule.
The course was also a superb observation opportunity. In the small-group work, I found my teammates outstanding, each from a different professional field, and the collision of perspectives genuinely widened my view. Absorbing diverse ideas like a sponge was the most precious part of this training for me.
Back in daily operations, our frontline workflows are often constrained by administrative routine, and as the team that runs the final leg — landing the communications — we often lacked a core basis for judging what to cut when priorities collided. The biggest takeaway for me is the courage to make trade-offs: when facing multiple options, return to the original business goal to decide. That is how the core value of agile actually lands. I look forward to continuing to learn with everyone and applying this mindset and method to improving our daily work.
Deputy Director Liao, Mobile Network Operations, Chunghwa Telecom Network Technology Branch
These two days left me full and genuinely happy. Back in school, my advisor told me: walk with excellent people, and even the air feels new and invigorating. In this course I truly felt that atmosphere — learning alongside so many outstanding senior leaders and cross-departmental colleagues was an honor. I am grateful to Roger for teaching without reservation and leading us deep into agile thinking.
In my current work, the team I lead has one core strategic goal this year: intelligent operations, especially the smart transformation of our base station inspection and maintenance workflows. We hope to use the agile methods and spirit from these two days to genuinely streamline our workflows, speed up execution, and create more value for the company while maintaining excellent quality.
Section Chief Yen, Digital Development Office, Chunghwa Telecom
The intensity of these two days was very high — dense, demanding, a real workout for the brain. We absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge in a short time.
All of it, I believe, is an asset we can genuinely take back and implement with our teams. Under Chunghwa Telecom’s current development model, progress tends to move in quarterly or even yearly strides. If we can weave agile thinking and process into it, future development will run smoother and faster.
Our past development process leaned toward traditional waterfall, which means teams usually cannot validate outcomes until a long development cycle fully ends. That creates a familiar bind: once a product is built, adjusting, maintaining, or retiring it is extremely hard. With agile, as the course emphasized, we can spot potential product problems at a very early stage. It does not mean products never need correction or retirement, but it dramatically shortens each iteration-and-test error cycle — find it early, fix it early.
When the company develops 50, then 100 CSPOs with executive-level thinking, our culture and operations will flip visibly. The first change: product delivery control will compress from quarterly thinking toward precise monthly cycles. And each product increment will carry a clear, concrete definition and output every month — exactly the core spirit of CSPO training — instead of blindly chasing glossy quarterly KPIs. I believe this shift in thinking will smooth the company’s overall agile culture transformation.
Section Chief Chen, Chunghwa Telecom (PhD in Law)
I had never touched agile management before. After two intensive days in Roger’s course, I not only built a solid basic understanding of Scrum, but learned through hands-on cases how to actually apply the method — learning by doing, in the truest sense.
Looking back at my earlier work, project execution constantly fell behind the plan’s assumptions. Teams got lost in the client’s endless ad-hoc requests and consultations, losing sight of the project’s intended goals and value — and colleagues burned out, hurting morale. Scrum taught me to slice project work into distinct events with timeboxes — Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review — moving with agility while flexibly absorbing new client demands.
I now handle the company’s internal legal work, which must keep pace with every business initiative and project. The more Scrum projects the company launches, the more the legal function will need to move in step. For the projects my office is executing and planning now, we can adopt Scrum to deliver within the required timeframes. I will share the Scrum method with my colleagues, hoping to lift our team’s performance and serve the business units better. My thanks to the company for this excellent course, and to Roger for a brilliant delivery.
Deputy Director Chiu, Network Planning & Design, Chunghwa Telecom
Through this Scrum and CSPO course, I came to deeply appreciate Scrum’s management spirit: value-driven, fast feedback, continuous improvement, and cross-team collaboration. Compared with traditional project management, it is far more effective at raising a team’s agility and the transparency of its work. For network planning and design — whether introducing new technology, driving network construction, coordinating across units, or managing innovation projects — mechanisms like Sprints, Backlogs, and Reviews can accelerate requirement clarification and outcome validation, lifting both execution efficiency and quality.
Going forward, I will apply Scrum thinking to my department’s work and project management: short-cycle goal management, continuous review, and rolling adjustment to strengthen execution and organizational agility. I will prioritize adopting it in projects involving our Gen Z colleagues, using an autonomous, transparent, and collaborative management style to spark creativity and ownership. And step by step, I hope to weave Scrum’s core values — openness, focus, commitment, respect, and courage — into our department culture, making continuous improvement and value creation the DNA of our network planning and design team.
Section Chief Hsieh, Chunghwa Telecom
After unifying the six kingdoms, Qin Shi Huang — China’s first emperor — standardized the written script and the axle width of carts. By standardizing writing, measurement, and institutions, he built the foundation for collaboration across regions, strengthening governance and fueling economic and cultural exchange, with a profound influence on the continuity of Chinese civilization.
Looking back at our own organization, units have differed in workflows, requirement management, and quality standards, which produced uneven height, depth, and breadth in what we deliver — and diluted overall value creation. After this intensive CSPO course, I gained a much deeper appreciation of that ancient governance insight: standardize first, then scale.
Agile transformation works the same way. An enterprise should anchor on a shared vision and customer value, and build consistent institutions, processes, and product management frameworks so every member clearly understands their responsibility and goals. The Product Owner is not merely a requirements manager but the helmsman of product value — like the steersman of a dragon boat, guiding the team toward a common destination — while the development team, through self-management, cross-domain collaboration, and continuous improvement, lands the product vision step by step: small steps, fast iterations, continuous delivery.
Next, as seed practitioners keep spreading Scrum and product thinking — building a common language, common standards, and common goals — the organization can stay flexible yet consistent, uniting everyone’s strength to build Chunghwa Telecom’s next golden decade.
Postscript | One Line from the President
After the course, I forwarded Section Chief Hsieh’s reflection to Chunghwa Telecom’s president and asked him: how close is this to what you originally had in mind when you launched this program?
His reply was short: Hsieh put it well, and precisely — this is exactly what the EDP executive development program was designed to achieve.
Honestly, that brief exchange carries more weight than any closing report. A section chief explained product governance through a 2,200-year-old lesson in standardization, and the president said that was his intent all along. Insight rising from below met vision set from above — in the same language.
That is what it looks like when a shared language actually takes hold.
