Anonymous pulse notes say the vital-records team fears the Product Owner. How should the Scrum Master / Team Coach treat that data?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Fear of the Product Owner is not an HR-only footnote—it is a performance alarm. Vital-records work dies in a room where people will not speak. Safety data belongs on the same table as flow.
Full Explanation
Anonymous pulse notes that the vital-records team fears the Product Owner are first-class performance evidence about psychological safety and team health, not "HR only" trivia to discard. Fear suppresses candor in refinement, quality calls, and estimates—directly harming municipal record accuracy, cycle time, and defect discovery. Filing the notes as Human Resources-only and keeping them out of performance conversations splits safety from delivery as if culture were optional. Discarding anonymous notes because fear is not a flow metric pretends culture is irrelevant to flow. Asking the Release Train Engineer to replace the Product Owner before talking with the team jumps to train-level personnel action without coaching the conflict and safety pattern the team is signaling. Exam caveat: SASM includes psychological safety in high-performing team assessment; HR-only filing, metric dismissal, and premature RTE personnel moves are distractors. Operational check: treat the pulse theme as a coaching agenda item with the team while protecting anonymity, facilitate safer feedback norms between team and Product Owner, watch whether estimation and defect discussions become more honest, and involve HR only if misconduct thresholds are crossed. Re-pulse after changes to see whether fear signals decline on the vital-records team.