The Scrum Team is two thirds of the way to its Product Goal of opening the product to self-service sign-up. A board member arrives with a second objective, a partner marketplace, and asks the Product Owner to run both from now on. What does Scrum say about holding two Product Goals at once?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Not correct Two Product Goals are fine as long as each has its own section of the Product Backlog and its own Sprint Goals
Wrong. Partitioning the backlog does not create focus, it divides it, and Scrum attaches one commitment to the Product Backlog rather than one per section.
Not correct Two Product Goals are fine as long as the Developers can forecast enough capacity for both in each Sprint
Wrong, and it is the tempting managerial reading. Capacity is not the constraint being described; the constraint is that a Product Goal is the single long-term objective the team plans against.
Not correct The Scrum Master decides which Product Goal takes precedence, since the request came from outside the Scrum Team
Wrong. Choosing the product's objective is a Product Owner decision, and the Scrum Master's part is to help the organisation understand why one objective at a time is the point.
Correct The Scrum Team must fulfil or abandon the current Product Goal before taking on the marketplace objective
Correct. One objective is held at a time, and abandoning it is a legitimate outcome — but it is a deliberate decision, not something that happens by quietly adding a second goal alongside.
Why
The Product Goal is the long-term objective in the Product Backlog, and the rest of the backlog emerges to define what will fulfil it. Holding two at once destroys that relationship — the backlog can no longer be read as one route to one future state. Note the word abandon: Scrum offers an honest exit, not only a finish line. If a stem shows a second goal being added on top, the answer is finish or drop the first.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Commitment: Product Goal
- What it says
- The Product Goal is the long-term objective for the Scrum Team. They must fulfill (or abandon) one objective before taking on the next.
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
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