A Product Owner makes his calls in hallway conversations and one-to-one phone calls. Stakeholders keep asking the Developers what became of their requests, the Product Backlog has not been reordered in six weeks, and its top items are stale. He says the Developers know his priorities perfectly well. What is the problem in Scrum terms?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Correct His decisions are invisible — they are meant to be visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review
Correct. Decisions that live only in conversation cannot be respected, because nobody outside the conversation can see what was decided or challenge it.
Not correct He is delegating too little of the Product Backlog work and should hand item writing to a business analyst
Wrong. A Product Owner may do the work or delegate it and remains accountable either way, so delegation is not the axis this turns on. His problem is visibility, not workload.
Not correct Nothing, as long as the Developers know what to pick up next — the Product Backlog is a planning tool for the Scrum Team
Wrong. The Product Backlog is designed to maximise transparency of key information so that everyone inspecting it has the same basis for adaptation, and stakeholders are among those inspecting.
Not correct He should hold a weekly priority meeting with stakeholders so that the decisions are at least recorded somewhere
Wrong, and it is the fix most organisations reach for. It answers a transparency problem with a meeting when the artefact that already exists for the purpose is sitting there unordered.
Why
Scrum asks the organisation to respect the Product Owner's decisions, and it names where those decisions can be found: the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and the Increment inspected at the Sprint Review. That pairing is not decoration — it is the price of the authority. A Product Owner who will not make his ordering visible is asking to be trusted about decisions nobody can examine, and stakeholders respond exactly as these ones did, by going round him to the Developers.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- These decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review.
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