One product is built by three Scrum Teams. Each team has kept its own Product Backlog and its own Product Owner, and the three Product Owners meet monthly to align. Releases keep clashing and nobody in the organisation can say what the single most valuable next thing for the product is. What does Scrum say about this structure?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Not correct It works as long as the three Product Owners agree a common ordering at their monthly alignment meeting
Wrong. Three lists reconciled once a month are still three lists: between meetings each team orders locally, and no one position in any of them is a statement about the product as a whole.
Not correct It works once a chief Product Owner is appointed above the three to arbitrate between their backlogs
Wrong. Scrum defines no chief Product Owner and no hierarchy of Product Owners; inventing a tier above the three leaves the three backlogs in place and adds a role the framework does not contain.
Correct Multiple Scrum Teams working on the same product should share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog and Product Owner
Correct. The Guide says this directly about teams on one product, and it is what makes an ordering mean anything: one list in which every piece of work competes with every other.
Not correct The split is required, because one Product Owner may not serve more than one Scrum Team
Wrong. Nothing in Scrum caps how many teams a Product Owner may serve; the constraint runs the other way, tying one product to one backlog and one Product Owner.
Why
An ordering only carries information if everything that competes for the same product's capacity sits in the same list. Split the product across three backlogs and each is honestly ordered against itself while the product-level trade-off — this team's third item against that team's first — never gets made by anyone. That is why the Guide's own answer to a team that has grown too big is to reorganise into several teams around the same Product Goal, Product Backlog and Product Owner, rather than to divide the backlog with the people.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- Therefore, they should share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog, and Product Owner.
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