PMI-ACP Practice Questions #107
As a Scrum Master, you are coaching the Product Owner, who is struggling to ensure that each sprint delivers meaningful business value. The Product Owner is receiving conflicting feedback from stakeholders—some want immediate short-term gains, while others push for long-term strategic initiatives. Additionally, many stakeholders do not fully understand the overall product vision and priorities, making it difficult to manage expectations and backlog refinement.
What would you recommend to the Product Owner to ensure alignment and maximize business value?
A. Secure alignment on vision and roadmap by working with stakeholders to ensure they understand the product’s strategic direction.
B. Involve stakeholders in backlog refinement sessions so they can directly influence prioritization based on their business needs.
C. Encourage stakeholders to interact directly with the development team to provide input and clarify their expectations.
D. Take clear sign-off on requirements from stakeholders before adding them to the backlog to avoid changes later.
Analysis
The primary challenge in this scenario is that the Product Owner is struggling to ensure that each sprint delivers meaningful business value due to conflicting feedback from stakeholders. Some stakeholders push for short-term gains, while others focus on long-term strategies. Additionally, stakeholders do not fully understand the overall product vision and priorities, leading to misalignment and difficulty in managing expectations and backlog refinement.
The key to solving this issue is establishing alignment on the product vision and roadmap first before addressing backlog prioritization. Without a clear shared understanding of strategic direction, refining the backlog collaboratively will not be effective.
Analysis of Options
A: Secure alignment on vision and roadmap by working with stakeholders to ensure they understand the product’s strategic direction.
This is the best choice because the root problem in the scenario is misalignment on product vision and strategy among stakeholders. Before refining the backlog, it is crucial to ensure that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the long-term direction and short-term priorities. Once alignment is established, prioritization decisions in backlog refinement will be more effective. The product roadmap provides clarity on what needs to be built and when, ensuring that business value is maximized.
B: Involve stakeholders in backlog refinement sessions so they can directly influence prioritization based on their business needs.
While involving stakeholders in backlog refinement is a good Agile practice, it does not address the core issue highlighted in the question—lack of alignment on vision and strategy. If stakeholders do not share a common understanding of the product direction, backlog refinement alone will not resolve the conflicting priorities. Instead, it may lead to further disagreements. Therefore, this option is secondary to securing alignment on the vision first.
C: Encourage stakeholders to interact directly with the development team to provide input and clarify their expectations.
Direct communication between stakeholders and the development team is generally encouraged in Agile; however, this does not address the fundamental issue of conflicting priorities. Simply allowing stakeholders to interact with developers may clarify individual features, but it will not solve the problem of misalignment at a strategic level. The development team does not set priorities—the Product Owner does, based on stakeholder input and business value. Therefore, this is not an effective solution to the problem described.
D: Take clear sign-off on requirements from stakeholders before adding them to the backlog to avoid changes later.
This approach contradicts Agile principles. Agile embraces change and flexibility based on feedback and learning. Seeking sign-offs to prevent future changes would create unnecessary rigidity and go against the iterative nature of Agile development. This option is not appropriate.
Conclusion
The best course of action is Option A: Secure alignment on vision and roadmap by working with stakeholders to ensure they understand the product’s strategic direction.
The key reason is that before prioritizing work in backlog refinement sessions, stakeholders need to be aligned on the product’s overall direction. Once that clarity is achieved, backlog refinement (Option B) becomes more meaningful. Therefore, Option A is the first step to resolving the problem, and backlog refinement follows as a continuous engagement process.
PMI – ACP Exam Content Outline Mapping
| Domain | Task |
| Leadership | Promote Shared Vision and Purpose |
Topics Covered:
- Facilitating stakeholder alignment on the product vision and roadmap to resolve conflicting priorities between short-term and long-term goals.
- Promoting transparency and shared understanding of the product’s strategic direction to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page.
- Guiding the Product Owner to lead with clarity of purpose, helping stakeholders understand how each feature or initiative contributes to the overall vision.
- Establishing a shared product roadmap as a tool to communicate priorities and timing, thereby reducing miscommunication and expectation gaps.
- Ensuring backlog prioritization is driven by aligned business value, which becomes effective only after strategic alignment is achieved.
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