The Product Owner has been pulled onto a due-diligence exercise and has missed the last three Sprint Plannings. He has told the Developers to "take whatever is at the top of the list". The Product Backlog has not been reordered in six weeks. What is the Scrum Master's most appropriate response?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams hard
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Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
The options
Not correct Order the Product Backlog herself each week until the Product Owner is available again
Wrong, and this is the trap: it is helpful, it is fast, and it silently transfers a value decision to someone who does not hold it. The Product Owner would remain accountable for an ordering he never made.
Correct Make the absence visible and work with the Product Owner and his management on how the accountability can actually be met, including what he may delegate and to whom
Correct. The Product Owner may delegate the work of backlog management but remains accountable for it, so the Scrum Master's move is to restore a working arrangement — and to make the organisation see the cost of an unavailable Product Owner.
Not correct Ask the Developers to vote on the ordering at the start of each Sprint Planning
Wrong. Ordering the Product Backlog is not a matter for a vote; a team-decided order has no single accountable owner and stops being a defensible view of value.
Not correct Cancel Sprints until the Product Owner returns, since Scrum cannot run without him
Wrong on two counts. Only the Product Owner may cancel a Sprint, and he may do so only when the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete — not as a protest at his own absence.
Why
An absent Product Owner is an impediment, and it is one the Scrum Master causes to be removed rather than papers over. The Guide allows delegation of the work — writing items, refining, even ordering with someone — but never of the accountability, so the answer is always an arrangement that keeps a real Product Owner in the loop. A Scrum Master who quietly becomes the Product Owner has removed the transparency that would have got the problem solved.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
- A team lead who sits outside the Scrum Team has taken to opening the board every Monday and assigning each Sprint Backlog item to a named Developer for the week. The Developers say the assignments rarely match who is best placed to pick the work up. Who decides which Developer works on which item? machine-checked
- On day four of a two-week Sprint, a department head tells one of the five Developers to spend the rest of the week on a customer escalation for another product. The Sprint Goal depends on that Developer's work. What should the Scrum Master do? machine-checked
- During Sprint Planning, a solution architect who is not on the Scrum Team hands the Developers a task breakdown for each selected Product Backlog item and asks them to follow it. The Developers had planned to decompose the work differently. What does Scrum say about this? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team is reworking its Daily Scrum. They are tired of three questions each and want to try walking the board right to left instead, and they also want to know how much else about the event they are free to change. Which two of the following are genuinely theirs to decide? (Choose two.) machine-checked
- A Scrum Team has stopped keeping its Sprint Backlog current, and when a stakeholder asks how the Sprint is going the Developers reply that they are self-managing and will show the result at the Sprint Review. Two Sprints in a row have then missed the Sprint Goal. What is wrong here? machine-checked
- With three days of the Sprint left, the Developers agree among themselves to skip the security review and the automated regression suite, both of which are in the Definition of Done, so that two more items can be finished. They argue that as a self-managing team it is their call. Is it? machine-checked