The council wants twelve must-do digital products this year across permits, transit, and parks, and only five Scrum Teams exist. What should the Product Owner do?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Twelve pizzas and five ovens is not a planning problem solved with louder promises. City councils can want permits, buses, and parks all at once; the math still has five teams. Decline the overload and make the cut list explicit.
Full Explanation
Portfolio commitments must fit actual capacity. When the council wants twelve must-do digital products across permits, transit, and parks, and only five Scrum Teams exist, accepting the overload destroys transparency, inflates forecasts, and silently drops work later. The Product Owner should decline a portfolio commitment that exceeds the teams’ real capacity and force a cut list. Velocity theater, one-hundred-percent confidence, and extra project codes do not create people. An explicit cut list is advanced Product Ownership: strategy and capacity, not political overcommit.
Accepting all twelve and asking each Team to raise velocity by working weekends fails by substituting burnout for math. Promising all twelve with one-hundred-percent confidence fails by protecting political capital with a false forecast. Creating twelve project codes so finance sees progress even if Teams are not named fails by inventing phantom delivery.
Exam caveat: Decline portfolio commitments that exceed real team capacity; force an explicit cut list. Operational check: Present council with five-team capacity, propose which of the twelve products start now versus wait, and refuse a plan that assumes weekend velocity or fake project codes.