Evolving the Agile Organization

PSPO II · 90 questions

• Completing one building-permit citizen journey requires the Product Owner to coordinate six component teams for forms, payments, identity, GIS, notifications, and records. Handoffs stall value every Sprint. What should the Product Owner advocate?
• In the city’s matrix structure, line managers and a digital PMO all change the transit-app backlog order, leaving the named Product Owner without real authority. What should the Product Owner ask leadership to do?
• Utilities billing work still flows through separate analysis, build, and test departments, each with its own queue. Leaders call the stages “Agile phases.” How should the Product Owner explain the problem?
• HR assigns Developers from a shared resource pool to the parks booking Scrum Team on a weekly rotation to maximize utilization. What should the Product Owner argue for?
• An enterprise architecture review board must approve every Increment of the 311 request product before release, often adding weeks of wait time. What should the Product Owner seek?
• The health department funds the clinic-booking effort as a nine-month project with a fixed end date, after which the team will be released even if the product still serves patients. What should the Product Owner push for?
• Leadership assigns two Product Owners to the single building-permit product “for coverage” during vacation and evening council meetings. They publish conflicting backlog orders. What problem should the candidate identify?
• Security only reviews the benefits-eligibility product in a final audit after development is “feature complete,” often rejecting work that citizens were about to use. What should the Product Owner do in the org-design conversation?
• Eligibility workers sit in district offices, while the public-health case-management Developers sit downtown and only accept written handoffs. Feedback on the citizen journey takes months. What should the Product Owner propose?
• Mid-Sprint, middle managers pull Developers off the transit-app team for “higher-priority projects,” wrecking the Sprint Goal and the release forecast. What should the Product Owner escalate?
• A city building-permits Product Owner sees a standing dependency board with dozens of tickets waiting on GIS, payments, and records teams before any permit Increment can be issued, and leadership calls the board great coordination. What should the Product Owner argue?
• A municipal public-health center of excellence publishes a mandatory Product Backlog template and claims enterprise ownership of every health-program backlog, including vaccine booking. What should the Product Owner do?
• A transit department org chart keeps fare-engine, map, and accessibility specialists in separate pools so each specialist stays fully utilized, and the fare-app Product Owner sees multi-Sprint waits to assemble one citizen-facing Increment. What should the Product Owner argue the structure should optimize for?
• Parks recreation-booking call-center staff hear weekly complaints about waitlists and payment failures, but those insights never reach the Product Owner. What structural change should the Product Owner create?
• The city’s 311 request product funds a separate innovation lab that prototypes citizen-request ideas but has no path to production systems and no Definition of Done. What should the Product Owner challenge?
• County HR promotes public-health digital leaders only when they manage large staffs, so managers resist small cross-functional vaccine-booking teams. What should the Product Owner surface?
• A building-permits stakeholder committee casually reorders the Product Backlog between Sprint Planning sessions, undoing the Product Owner’s daily ordering. What should the Product Owner request?
• Outsourcing contracts split transit-app work into a vendor interface team and a city backend team that cannot share one Sprint Goal or Definition of Done. What should the Product Owner seek?
• A parks PMO still requires stage-gate packets before any recreation-booking Increment may go live, even when the Increment already meets the Definition of Done. What should the Product Owner collaborate toward?
• Central IT must approve every pipeline and backlog-tool change for the utilities-billing product, creating multi-week waits that stall experiments. What should the Product Owner support?
• After going Agile, the public-health department added standups, reviews, and extra steering meetings but left inspection, lab-results, and clinic-booking work in the same siloed structure. What should the Product Owner push for?
• Business analysts in the building-permits bureau sit outside the Scrum Team writing specification packets, then throw them over the wall to Developers who never meet applicants. What should the Product Owner do?
• Leadership assigns one Product Owner to the transit app, parking meters, bikeshare, and ferry tickets for efficiency, and none of the products has a coherent Product Goal. What should the Product Owner raise?
• Every month a temporary tiger team pulls parks Developers off recreation booking to rush a council demo elsewhere. What should the Product Owner show?
• City digital services organizes teams by department systems such as tax, licensing, and utilities, so a resident moving to the city must complete four disconnected journeys. What should the Product Owner promote?
• A change advisory board holds vaccine-booking releases for three extra weeks even when the Increment is Done and the operational risk is low. What should the Product Owner partner toward?
• The city’s metrics office scores the building-permits product only on project on-time percentage against last year’s Gantt, so teams pad dates and avoid valuable learning. What should the Product Owner influence?
• The transit-app Scrum Team waits a month in a shared-services user-experience queue before any fare-flow experiment can be designed. What should the Product Owner argue?
• Recreation-booking value is blocked by a hiring-policy freeze on digital access for park staff, an issue no Scrum Team can lift alone. What should the Product Owner do?
• After a city reorganization, it is unclear whether resident accounts, payments, and notifications are one product or three, and three people claim Product Owner accountability. What should the Product Owner insist on first?
• The city portfolio currently funds forty digital initiatives at once, including permits, transit, parks, and public health, so every Scrum Team is context-switching. What should the Product Owner advocate?
• A portfolio committee demands a detailed annual feature plan for the transit app, complete with month-by-month commitments. What should the Product Owner push instead?
• Vaccine booking and restaurant-inspection scheduling both expect the same public-health Scrum Team’s full capacity next quarter. What should happen at the portfolio level?
• Leadership wants to keep a little-used parks events microsite because a council member likes it, while the Product Owner has evidence of low Current Value relative to operating cost. What should the Product Owner bring to the kill-or-keep discussion?
• The city portfolio names a strategic theme of faster, clearer permitting, then executives try to dictate a forty-item feature list for the permits Product Backlog. What should the Product Owner do?
• A city digital-services portfolio dashboard for building permits, clinic appointments, and transit alerts shows only budget burn and red-amber-green status. What should the Product Owner add so portfolio inspection actually informs value decisions?
• After a council listening session, the public-health product group is flooded with urgent app ideas and every sponsor wants a team this quarter. How should the Product Owner shape portfolio intake?
• Mid-year evidence shows a new bus-priority corridor is cutting commute times far more than a frozen bike-share kiosk project, but fixed project budgets block moving people to the hotter opportunity. What should the Product Owner argue for?
• Parks reservations, special-event street closures, and building permits only talk when a festival weekend blows up in an emergency war room. What portfolio design should the Product Owner pursue?
• The city's building-permit portal is a stated strategic Product Goal but runs with a chronically understaffed Scrum Team, and leadership wants those same people to launch a new 311 chatbot product. What should the Product Owner do?
• The municipal portfolio board ranks next quarter's bets for parks, transit, and clinics by a round of highest-paid-person votes from department directors. What should the Product Owner introduce instead?
• Mid-year, a state public-health mandate requires a walk-up vaccination-clinic queue on the city's health product, with no new funding or people. What should the Product Owner force at the portfolio table?
• Transit real-time info, curbside parking, and paratransit scheduling share a city strategy of equitable access to getting around, but they serve different users and cadences. How should the Product Owner align them?
• Finance will capitalize a big parks-reservation rewrite but will not fund a small operating line for continuous improvement of the live reservation product, even though the rewrite is the worse citizen outcome. What should the Product Owner do?
• City leadership cannot see which digital-service bets are still ideas, which are scaling across neighborhoods, and which kiosk products should retire. What should the Product Owner establish?
• The city CIO wants one ranked list of 200 epics spanning permitting, clinics, parks, and buses so the whole enterprise has a backlog. What should the Product Owner argue?
• Every winter the city's property-tax portal spikes while summer parks reservations go quiet, then the reverse happens in June. What should the Product Owner do at the portfolio level?
• Nearly every transit product — fare, alerts, and paratransit scheduling — now runs on a single vendor platform. What should the Product Owner ensure at the portfolio level?
• A vanity mayor-branded parks selfie map is consuming a Scrum Team that could cut building-permit wait times. How should the Product Owner present the opportunity cost?
• Three legacy flu-clinic registration apps still run beside a newer public-health product, and the portfolio has no retire rules. What should the Product Owner propose?
• Public works, parks, and the clerk's office each run a separate report-a-problem app with overlapping citizen journeys. What should the Product Owner recommend?
• The permitting portfolio funds only delivery factories that implement already-written form fields, while discovery of why applicants abandon filings is unfunded. What should the Product Owner ensure?
• The city's emergency mass-notification product must be ready every day, but it is funded by an annual project request that sometimes arrives after storm season. What funding model should the Product Owner push?
• The monthly city portfolio meeting only reviews which products are green on the RAG board, even though permitting and clinic experiments produced surprising learning. What should the Product Owner change about the meeting?
• 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?
• Internal cross-charges bill parks and public health by the ticket, so each department hoards a local app instead of sharing a citizen-identity product. What should the Product Owner flag?
• A five-year smart-city program has a single go-live and no intermediate citizen outcomes for transit, permits, or lighting. What should the Product Owner reframe it as?
• Department directors want the city portfolio to micromanage every feature on permits, parks, and clinic apps. What lightweight alternative should the Product Owner use?
• The public-works director insists the city portfolio order should equal that department's internal list, even when clinic access and permit delays affect more residents. What should the Product Owner do?
• A large parks kiosk-replacement initiative looked green on spend, but experiments showed residents already complete reservations on phones. What should the Product Owner treat as success?
• A city parks recreation-booking product scores high satisfaction among residents who already get permits, yet waitlists and unserved neighborhoods show large unmet demand. How should the Product Owner balance investment using Evidence-Based Management?
• Public-health leaders want a clinic-portal dashboard of page views, logins, and digital-transformation badges. How should the Product Owner choose measures under Evidence-Based Management?
• A municipal transit trip-planner can ship only on a citywide release train every six months, and Time-to-Market is terrible. What should the Product Owner do?
• Ability to Innovate on a building-permit product is falling as technical debt and context switching rise. How should the Product Owner use that Key Value Area with leadership?
• The Product Owner of a city housing-assistance portal is establishing Evidence-Based Management goals. Which ladder should they set and inspect with evidence?
• A housing-portal team met its Immediate Tactical Goal of launching an income-verification widget, but Intermediate Goal measures for faster eligibility decisions have not moved. What should the Product Owner do?
• A city 311 chatbot is popular with one neighborhood group. What should the Product Owner require before scaling it citywide?
• A public-health inspection case tool is used by city staff; residents mainly see the resulting certificates. How should the Product Owner measure Current Value?
• Unrealized Value interviews for a municipal clinic-appointment product show non-users stay away because they do not trust how health data will be used. What should the Product Owner target next?
• A utilities-billing Product Owner must define Time-to-Market so it reflects true delay from idea to value. Which measure should they use?
• A building-permit platform spends much of each Sprint on unplanned production incidents. Which measure belongs in Ability to Innovate?
• Parks leadership wants Evidence-Based Management evidence for a recreation-booking product to be the number of stakeholder meetings held. What should the Product Owner do?
• Library leadership wants digital-card sign-ups locked forever as the only Evidence-Based Management KPI for a library-account product. What should the Product Owner do?
• Evidence for a city transit-alerts product shows Current Value is healthy while Time-to-Market is poor. How should the Product Owner shift investment?
• A mayor's office presents a two-year feature roadmap for a parks-permitting product with no hypothesized outcomes, measures, or Key Value Area links. What should the Product Owner do?
• A curbside-parking pilot is called citywide-ready because a council aide liked it. What should the Product Owner do before rollout?
• Several teams work on a city recycling-set-out product but inspect unrelated numbers. How should the Product Owner enable Evidence-Based Management?
• A building-permits Product Owner sets an Intermediate Goal to reduce average permit decision time by 30 percent. What should follow?
• Citywide housing wait-list reduction lags by months, leaving the housing-portal Scrum Team without a near-term steer. What should the Product Owner do with measures?
• After a hiring freeze, leadership still adds scope to a public-health immunization registry, and Ability to Innovate then collapses. What should the Product Owner do with that evidence?
• A 311 service-request Product Owner is handed a 50-metric digital-excellence scorecard that nobody reads. What should they do under Evidence-Based Management?
• Resident NPS for a business-license portal looks strong, yet filers still fail tasks and cost-to-serve is rising. How should the Product Owner treat Current Value?
• A housing-assistance Product Owner needs to estimate Unrealized Value beyond people who already finish applications. Which signals should they use?
• A clinic-scheduling Product Owner cannot tell whether wait-time experiments work because appointment timestamps are incomplete. What should they do next?
• Near-term tactics on a city flood-alert product keep being invalidated by evidence, while the aim of timely, trusted warnings remains sound. How should the Product Owner treat the goals ladder?
• A county public-health clinic Product Owner is praised because Time-to-Market dropped after releasing a walk-in immunization check-in that still fails the Definition of Done—dose-lot verification is skipped. What should the Product Owner do?
• City transit leadership wants to inspect Evidence-Based Management measures for the rider-alerts product only at the annual budget hearing, even though rider-facing decisions happen every Sprint. How should the Product Owner set the evidence-review cadence?
• The Product Owner of a city building-permits portal adds a “one-click plan markup” experiment to the Product Backlog. What must be explicit on that item for it to be an Evidence-Based Management experiment rather than just another feature request?
• A parks recreation-booking Product Owner has run several Immediate Tactical experiments to lift midweek field utilization, the stated Intermediate Goal, and utilization has not moved. What should the Product Owner do next with leadership?
• The steering committee for a municipal affordable-housing lottery portal wants monthly slide decks of features shipped and hours billed. How should the Product Owner use Evidence-Based Management to change that conversation?