A vacant-property inspection pilot failed because evidence showed landlords were not the users with the job to be done — neighborhood caseworkers were — and feature tweaks are not helping. What should the Product Owner do?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
If the job belonged to caseworkers and the vision still talks to landlords, swapping buttons is rearranging chairs on the wrong porch. The problem diagnosis was wrong. Fix the vision, then the backlog can follow.
Full Explanation
When a vacant-property inspection pilot fails because evidence shows neighborhood caseworkers—not landlords—hold the job to be done, and feature tweaks are not helping, the Product Owner should revise the Product Vision to match the real user job rather than only shuffling features. Keeping the original landlord-facing vision and adding more landlord features doubles down on a disproven audience. Canceling immediately and archiving without a replacement vision abandons the civic need the pilot revealed. Changing only Sprint Goal wording while leaving the Product Vision untouched leaves the wrong north star in place. Exam caveat: vision must change when evidence invalidates the primary user and job; feature iteration alone is insufficient. Operational check: rewrite the vision around caseworker outcomes, reorder the backlog to that job, retire landlord-centric inventory that does not serve it, and inspect adoption with caseworkers at Sprint Reviews before scaling the pilot citywide. When pilots prove the wrong primary user for vacant-property inspection, vision change—not feature shuffling—is the Product Owner response. Reorder to caseworker jobs, retire landlord-centric inventory that does not serve them, and re-inspect adoption before scale.