A monthly governance board reviews the Product Backlog ordering and reorders the top ten items to match departmental commitments. The Product Owner is invited but does not have a vote. What should the Scrum Master help the organisation see?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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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
Correct For Product Owners to succeed the entire organisation must respect their decisions, so a board that outvotes the Product Owner removes the accountability it thinks it is exercising
Correct. If the ordering can be overruled, nobody is genuinely accountable for the product's value — the board cannot be, since it is not accountable, and the Product Owner cannot be, since she cannot decide.
Not correct The board's ordering is acceptable because stakeholders are entitled to influence the Product Backlog
Wrong, and it is the half-truth in the question. Stakeholders influence the backlog by convincing the Product Owner; influencing is not the same as voting, and the difference is the whole mechanism.
Not correct The Scrum Master should attend the board and defend the Product Owner's ordering on her behalf
Wrong. Advocating for one ordering substitutes the Scrum Master's judgement for the Product Owner's; the Scrum Master's work is on the arrangement that makes the ordering answerable, not on the ordering itself.
Not correct The board should be dissolved, because Scrum does not permit governance bodies
Wrong. Scrum says nothing about which bodies an organisation may have — a board that advises, asks questions and inspects the Increment is entirely compatible with it. Only the overrule is the problem.
Why
The demand that the organisation respect the Product Owner's decisions is stated as an obligation on the organisation, not a courtesy it may extend. The mechanism behind it is simple: value decisions have to be answerable, and they are only answerable if one person can make them and be inspected on the result. Those decisions show up in two places — the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review, which is where the board's real influence belongs.
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 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
- A portfolio manager has drawn up a spreadsheet ranking every requested feature by projected revenue and tells the Scrum Team to build them in that order. The Product Owner believes two of the top five items will not be used by the customers she has spoken to. Who is accountable for maximising the value of the product? machine-checked
- It is the last afternoon of the Sprint. Three of the eight selected items are coded and demonstrable on a laptop, but they have not been through the automated regression suite the Definition of Done requires. The Product Owner suggests showing them at tomorrow's Sprint Review anyway, marked as "pending test". What does Scrum say? machine-checked
- A new Scrum Master is asked by a director where in Scrum the organisation gets to see whether the last four weeks of work were worth anything, and what should change as a result. Which event is she describing? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team spent a Sprint building a bulk-import feature. It meets the Definition of Done, it is usable, and it was released on day nine. At the Sprint Review the stakeholders explain that since the Sprint began their largest customer has moved to a different data format, and nobody will use the feature. What does Scrum say about this Sprint, and what happens now? machine-checked
- A delivery manager introduces a quarterly target: every Scrum Team must raise its velocity by fifteen per cent, and team performance reviews will cite the number. Within two Sprints the team's story point totals have risen and no more working software is reaching users than before. What is the most accurate statement about this measure? machine-checked
- A Scrum Team is agreeing what it will actually put in front of stakeholders at the end of each Sprint. Which TWO of the following statements about the Increment are true in Scrum? machine-checked