A Product Owner needs three stakeholders from different departments in one room before she can settle the order of the next quarter's work; they have not been in the same room in a year. She asks the Scrum Master to arrange and facilitate the session. A Developer objects that facilitating business meetings is not a Scrum Master's job. Who is right?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Not correct The Developer — a Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum events and nothing else
Wrong, and it is the most plausible objection because Scrum Masters are accountable for the Scrum events taking place and being productive. That accountability is a floor, not a ceiling on what they facilitate.
Not correct The Developer, and the Product Owner should ask a manager to convene the session instead, since it is a business decision
Wrong. Nothing about the session being a business conversation removes it from the Scrum Master's service to the Product Owner, and routing it through a manager reintroduces the hierarchy Scrum is trying to work without.
Not correct The Developer in part — the Scrum Master may attend but must not facilitate, since facilitating a decision they have no stake in compromises their neutrality
Wrong, and the neutrality argument is invented. Facilitating is precisely how a neutral party helps a decision get made; there is no rule in Scrum restricting a Scrum Master to observing.
Correct The Product Owner — facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed is named as one of the ways a Scrum Master serves the Product Owner
Correct. It is on the short list of services to the Product Owner, alongside helping with Product Goal definition and Product Backlog management techniques.
Why
A Scrum Master serves three constituencies and the Product Owner is one of them, which is where this lands. The service is described as facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed — as requested covers the ask here, and as needed means a Scrum Master may raise it even when nobody has asked. What it never becomes is the Scrum Master making the ordering decision or carrying stakeholder messages; they build the room, the Product Owner decides in it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Master
- What it says
- Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed.
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
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- 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
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