A Product Owner is handed two systems with different user bases, different customers and separate budgets, and told to treat them as one product with a single Product Goal. She asks the Scrum Master what Scrum actually means by a product. Which answer matches the Guide?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility easy
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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 A product is a vehicle to deliver value with a clear boundary, known stakeholders and well-defined users or customers — so the boundary and the people served are what settle it, not the org chart
Correct. The definition is written in terms of value, boundary and the people served, and two systems with separate customers and no shared boundary do not satisfy it as one thing.
Not correct A product is whatever the organisation funds and reports on as a single line, since that is what the Product Goal must serve
Wrong. Funding structure is an accounting boundary, not a product boundary, and the two coincide only by luck.
Not correct A product is whatever a single Scrum Team works on, so one team means one product by definition
Wrong, and it is the tempting one because the two do often line up. Several Scrum Teams may work on one product, sharing a Product Goal, Product Backlog and Product Owner — team count is not what draws the boundary.
Not correct Scrum does not define a product; it defines only Increments and the Product Backlog
Wrong. Scrum does describe what a product is, and it does so in the section on the Product Goal because the Goal is meaningless without a boundary to apply it to.
Why
The Product Goal describes a future state of a product, so the definition of the product decides what the Goal can even mean. Scrum draws that line around value and around people — a clear boundary, known stakeholders, well-defined users or customers — and a product can be a service or something abstract rather than a piece of software. Two unrelated user populations forced under one Product Goal give the Scrum Team an objective that cannot be fulfilled or abandoned as one thing.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Commitment: Product Goal
- What it says
- A product is a vehicle to deliver value. It has a clear boundary, known stakeholders, well-defined users or customers.
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