A steering committee meets monthly and hands the Product Owner a fixed ordering for the next two Sprints. The Product Owner tells the Scrum Master he disagrees with it but has no standing to argue. What does the Scrum Master do?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 2. Developing people and teams medium
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The options
Correct Coach the committee and the Product Owner so that the committee influences the ordering by persuading the Product Owner, and the decision stays with him
Correct. Scrum gives stakeholders a real route — convincing the Product Owner — and keeps the decision in one accountable place, which is exactly the arrangement the Scrum Master teaches the organisation to respect.
Not correct Attend the committee and defend the Product Owner's preferred ordering on his behalf
Wrong. Speaking for the Product Owner leaves the committee still deciding and adds a second voice claiming ownership of the backlog; it treats a symptom of the same misunderstanding.
Not correct Accept the committee's ordering, since the organisation ultimately funds the product
Wrong, and it is the answer most organisations would give. Funding a product does not make a committee the Product Owner; an ordering nobody is accountable for is precisely what Scrum removes.
Not correct Have the Developers select items in whatever order suits their technical plan instead
Wrong. Developers select how much and plan how, through discussion with the Product Owner, but the order in which value is pursued is not theirs to set.
Why
A committee that dictates the order is a committee acting as Product Owner, and the Guide is blunt that the Product Owner is one person. The mechanism matters more than the rule: a single accountable owner is what makes the ordering explicable and changeable, and what lets stakeholders know whom to convince. The Scrum Master's work here is with the organisation — teaching it to respect the decision — not with the ordering itself.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions.
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