After a Sprint whose Increment turned out to be of little use to anyone, two Developers tell the Scrum Master that value is not their concern — they build what the Product Owner puts in front of them, and she is the one accountable for value. How should the Scrum Master respond?
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
Not correct They are correct, since the Product Owner is accountable for maximising the value of the product
Wrong, and it is tempting because the first half is a real Scrum sentence. Value being one person's accountability does not make creating a valuable Increment one person's job.
Correct The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint, so their questions and expertise are part of the mechanism
Correct. Developers who see that an item will not do what the Product Owner hopes are the cheapest possible source of that information, and Scrum expects them to say so rather than build it silently.
Not correct They are correct, and the Scrum Master should raise the value problem with the Product Owner privately instead
Wrong on two counts. It accepts the split, and it routes a conversation that belongs to the whole team through an intermediary who has no accountability for the product's content.
Not correct The Developers should take over ordering the Product Backlog so that value becomes their concern too
Wrong. Sharing accountability for a valuable Increment does not move the ordering decision; the Product Owner still orders the Product Backlog, informed by what the Developers know.
Why
Two accountabilities sit side by side and get conflated constantly. The Product Owner is accountable for maximising the value of the product; the entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint. Neither absorbs the other. The practical consequence is that a Developer who stays quiet about a feature they believe is pointless has not done their job — Scrum Teams are cross-functional and responsible for all product-related activities, including telling the Product Owner what they know.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint.
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