A Product Owner covering three markets asks a business analyst to write and maintain most of the Product Backlog items, and asks a senior Developer to keep the middle of the backlog ordered against the technical roadmap. A manager objects that this is no longer Scrum. Which statement is correct?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Correct It is allowed — the Product Owner may have others do this work, and remains accountable for the result either way
Correct. The Guide explicitly permits delegating the work of Product Backlog management while pinning the accountability in one place, so the Product Owner still answers for every item and every position in the order.
Not correct It is not allowed, because Product Backlog items must be written by the Product Owner personally
Wrong. Nothing in Scrum requires the Product Owner's own hands on the keyboard; requiring it would make a Product Owner a bottleneck rather than a decision maker.
Not correct It is allowed, and the analyst and the Developer become jointly accountable for Product Backlog management for the parts they hold
Wrong, and it is the tempting half-truth. The work is genuinely shared here, but accountability is not divisible in Scrum — spread it across three people and no one can be asked why the backlog is in the order it is in.
Not correct It is allowed only if the Scrum Master approves the arrangement and reviews it each Sprint
Wrong. There is no such approval step anywhere in Scrum. A Scrum Master may coach the Product Owner on whether this arrangement is working, which is a different thing from authorising it.
Why
Scrum separates doing the work from answering for it. A Product Owner who writes nothing and orders nothing personally can still be a perfectly good Product Owner, provided every item and every position in the order is one they own when asked. The exam sentence to carry is that delegation moves effort and never moves accountability — so the right question about any such arrangement is not who typed it but who answers for it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.
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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