A divisional director tells the Scrum Team that the Product Owner's ordering is wrong and that, as the budget holder, they are overriding it for the next two Sprints. The Product Owner has listened to the argument and is not persuaded. What does Scrum say?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility hard
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
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 The organisation is required to respect the Product Owner's decisions — the director may keep trying to convince them, but the ordering is not the director's to override
Correct. Scrum puts the obligation on the organisation rather than on the Product Owner, and names exactly one route for anyone who wants the backlog changed: trying to convince the person accountable for it.
Not correct The director's ordering applies, because the Product Owner represents the needs of stakeholders and this stakeholder has spoken
Wrong, and it inverts the sentence it borrows. Representing many stakeholders' needs in the backlog is precisely the Product Owner's job of weighing them, not a duty to enact whichever stakeholder has the most authority.
Not correct The Scrum Master decides, since removing impediments to the Scrum Team's progress covers a dispute of this kind
Wrong. The Scrum Master will certainly work on this impediment — by coaching the organisation on how a Product Owner works — but causing the removal of an impediment is not the same as ruling on the product's direction.
Not correct The Scrum Team should vote, since the Scrum Team is self-managing and this affects everyone in it
Wrong. Self-management is about how the team chooses to do the work; it never converts a single accountability into a show of hands.
Why
This is the item candidates lose by answering pragmatically. Scrum does not say the Product Owner is always right; it says the organisation must respect their decisions, because an ordering that can be overturned by whoever outranks the Product Owner is not an ordering at all. Note what the Guide does not do: it says nothing about how the Product Owner accountability is assigned, so who holds it stays an organisational matter. What Scrum settles is narrower and firmer — while this person holds it, the way to move the backlog is to persuade them.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions.
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