Managing Products with Agility

PSM-I · 36 questions

• At a home-robot company, the retail launch director insists the companion-app squad reorder the Product Backlog to put a marketing-requested feature ahead of a firmware safety fix already sitting at the top. Who actually has the authority to change the order of the Product Backlog?
• A support-operations lead emails the Developers directly, asking them to bump a battery-overheating bug fix above everything else in the Sprint because support tickets are spiking. The Developers agree and quietly change the Sprint's plan without looping in the Product Owner. What is the problem with this outcome?
• A new Scrum Master at the home-robot company schedules a two-hour 'Backlog Refinement' meeting every other Friday and tells the Scrum Team refinement only happens there. A Developer asks whether that's really how refinement is supposed to work. What should the Developer be told?
• The home-robot company's Product Owner writes: 'By the end of Q3, the companion app reliably reconnects to the robot after any home Wi-Fi drop, with no customer-visible setup step.' The Scrum Team then pulls Product Backlog items over several Sprints that all move toward that statement. What is that statement functioning as?
• The Product Owner for the robot's cloud services is buried in stakeholder meetings, so a senior Developer starts writing acceptance criteria for upcoming Product Backlog items and quietly reordering a few based on what seems technically easiest. Is this arrangement acceptable under Scrum?
• As the home-robot company grows from one Scrum Team to four — app, firmware, cloud, and hardware — the firmware team's lead proposes each team keep its own separate Product Backlog so they can move independently. What does the Scrum Guide say about this, given there is one product?
• During a refinement conversation, the Developers estimate that a proposed obstacle-avoidance feature for the robot will take about three Sprints and ask the Product Owner to clarify what 'done enough to demo' would look like for the first slice. What is this exchange an example of?
• Two Developers on the hardware team decide, on their own, to swap the order of two upcoming Product Backlog items because tackling them in the opposite order lines up better with a parts shipment they're expecting. They don't mention it to the Product Owner. What's the concern here?
• A manufacturing-floor supervisor tells the Product Owner that a particular firmware calibration step is error-prone on the assembly line and asks for it to be simplified soon. The Product Owner listens, asks follow-up questions, and later decides where that work lands in the Product Backlog relative to everything else. What does this exchange illustrate about stakeholder engagement?
• As the home-robot company scales to several Scrum Teams sharing one Product Backlog, a new hire assumes each team's Product Owner-facing contact effectively co-owns backlog decisions as a small committee. A veteran corrects this assumption. What is the correct statement?
• The Product Owner updates the Product Backlog's long-range statement from 'expand the robot line to outdoor use' to 'the robot line safely operates on uneven outdoor terrain by year-end,' and several previously low-priority items suddenly move up because they now clearly serve that statement. What best explains why the items moved?
• The Product Owner asks a UX researcher to run stakeholder interviews and asks two Developers to flesh out acceptance criteria for the next dozen Product Backlog items, then reviews everything before finalizing order. A stakeholder later asks, 'so who do I actually hold accountable if this backlog goes wrong?' What's the correct answer?
• A stakeholder asks the Scrum Master, 'when exactly is your team's refinement meeting, so I can send my request in time?' The Scrum Master explains there isn't a single fixed slot the way there is for the Daily Scrum. Why is that answer accurate under the 2020 Scrum Guide?
• Instead of holding a monthly meeting where support, retail, and manufacturing each vote on priorities, the Product Owner reviews field-failure reports, retail sell-through numbers, and assembly-line defect rates, then updates the Product Backlog order based on that evidence. What does this approach demonstrate?
• Two Product Backlog items are roughly the same size. One is a minor cosmetic tweak to the companion app's color scheme; the other closes a firmware gap that's currently blocking a safety-certification submission. The Product Owner puts the certification-blocking item first. What principle is being applied?
• The Product Owner asks the Scrum Master to facilitate the refinement conversations so the Product Owner can focus on stakeholder conversations that week. During that session, the Scrum Master keeps discussion on track but does not decide which items get refined first or make the final call on any item's order. Why does the Product Owner remain accountable for the Product Backlog even though the Scrum Master ran the meeting?
• A support-escalation manager pages the on-call Developer at 9pm asking them to move a specific bug fix to the very top of the Product Backlog immediately, without contacting the Product Owner, because a customer is upset on social media. The Developer complies overnight. What should happen the next morning?
• A retail buyer keeps emailing engineering leadership directly with feature requests instead of going through the Product Owner, and leadership keeps forwarding those emails straight into the Sprint Backlog. A consultant is asked to name the core Scrum problem with this pattern. What should the consultant say?
• At a consumer home-robot company, the companion-app team has shipped a new feature every Sprint for the last five Sprints, yet daily active use of the robot's app has not moved. What should this pattern prompt the Scrum Team to inspect?
• A Product Owner tells the Scrum Team their success this quarter will be measured by the total number of firmware features shipped before the retail launch window. A Developer pushes back on this framing. What is the strongest empirical reason for the pushback?
• The Product Owner believes customers will trust the home robot more if its companion app shows a live battery-health graph. Rather than building the full graphing feature across several Sprints, the Developers build a small Increment showing a simple percentage and release it to a subset of real customers. What Scrum concept does this approach demonstrate?
• A retail buyer asks the Product Owner to confirm, in writing, that a specific list of companion-app features will be complete by a fixed date six months out. The Product Owner instead explains this as a forecast based on recent Sprints. What is the Product Owner correctly reflecting about Scrum?
• Partway through a Sprint, the Developers on the firmware team realize two of the Product Backlog items they selected during Sprint Planning will take longer than expected, but the core capability behind the Sprint Goal is still achievable. What should the Developers do?
• A regulatory safety certification the home robot's firmware must pass before retail sale has a historically unpredictable review timeline. The Product Owner is building a release plan for a fixed holiday launch window. What is the most empirically sound way to plan around this uncertainty?
• The app team's next Increment depends on a firmware API that the firmware team has not yet finished. Both teams share one Product Backlog. What is the most empirical way for the Scrum Teams to manage this cross-team dependency?
• Customer support at the home-robot company reports a rise in returns citing "the robot doesn't do what I expected," even though the Developers have completed every planned Product Backlog item for the last three Sprints on schedule. What does this situation most likely indicate?
• The Product Owner assumes new customers struggle to pair the home robot with the companion app during first-time setup, but the team has no data confirming this. Before committing several Sprints to redesigning the pairing flow, what should the Scrum Team do first?
• A newer Product Owner asks the Scrum Master which specific estimation technique Scrum requires the team to use to forecast how much Product Backlog remains for the next retail cycle. How should the Scrum Master respond?
• A marketing director wants to announce an exact retail ship date to press six months before launch, based on the Product Owner's current forecast. What risk should the Product Owner raise before agreeing?
• A Product Backlog item for a new firmware feature cannot be called Done until it passes an external hardware safety certification that can take several weeks and is outside the Developers' control. How should the Scrum Team handle this at Sprint Review?
• At the end of a Sprint, the Developers complete only three of the five Product Backlog items they forecast during Sprint Planning, though the Sprint Goal was achieved. A stakeholder accuses the team of breaking its commitment. How should the Scrum Master respond?
• Two candidate Product Backlog items would take the Developers about the same effort: one adds a cosmetic new LED animation to the robot, and one fixes a navigation bug that causes the robot to bump furniture in small apartments. Framed purely in terms of product value, what should guide the choice?
• With four feature teams now working from one Product Backlog toward a fixed retail launch window, a hardware-parts delay threatens two other teams' planned work. What is the most empirically grounded response?
• Before pushing a firmware update to every home robot in the field, the Developers release it to a small percentage of devices first and monitor real error reports for a few days. What does this practice best demonstrate about how Scrum Teams should treat risky assumptions?
• Company leadership asks the Product Owner for a single, guaranteed unit-count the home robot will sell by the retail launch date so they can commit to a supplier contract. The Product Owner is uneasy about giving a single hard number. What is the soundest Scrum-based reasoning for that unease?
• After a full year of Sprints, the home-robot company has shipped far more app and firmware features than its closest competitor, yet the competitor is outselling them. What question should this prompt the Scrum Team to ask about their own performance?