A Product Owner keeps stacking the community-college waitlist team's backlog and asks, "Can you add this too?" What should the Scrum Master / Team Coach ask instead?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A backpack that never drops a book will rip. "Can you add this too?" is how waitlist work becomes an invisible pile. Ask what comes off when something new goes on—that is a question that protects focus.
Full Explanation
Powerful questions can force explicit trade-offs so WIP and team focus stay honest. When a Product Owner keeps stacking the community-college waitlist team's backlog and asks whether another item can be added, the Scrum Master / Team Coach should ask what will be traded off so new work competes with current focus instead of silently growing WIP. That question protects students waiting for seats by keeping throughput realistic rather than pretending infinite capacity.
Asking whether the team can just raise capacity this iteration fails by concept: capacity is not a wish; inflating it hides overload. Hiding extra items in a parking lot so the board looks lean fails by concept by masking demand and delaying honest prioritization. Hoping the Release Train Engineer assigns another team so nobody says no fails by concept: it avoids Product Owner trade-off ownership and treats train staffing as a denial-avoidance tool.
Exam caveat: SASM coaching on backlog and flow stresses making WIP and prioritization trade-offs visible; "just add it" without trade-offs is an anti-pattern. Saying no or not now is a Product Owner duty—the coach's role is to facilitate the trade-off question, not to absorb infinite scope for waitlist systems.
Operational check: ask the trade-off question whenever new waitlist work appears, require an explicit item to defer or descope, update the board visibly, resist silent parking-lot growth, and verify subsequent refinements show competing priorities discussed before capacity fantasies.