PMI-ACP Practice Questions #25
You are part of a team managing a website where a specific group of users, previously highly active, has recently shown a significant decline in visits. The team and stakeholders are unsure why this is happening and want to address the issue. As an Agile practitioner, how would you approach understanding the root cause of this decline?
A. Organize a workshop with the team and stakeholders to collaboratively perform empathy mapping for this user group, exploring their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.
B. Conduct stakeholder interviews to gather their opinions on what might have caused the drop in user visits, and use those insights to plan the next steps.
C. Experiment with new features designed to re-engage this user group and see which ones resonate best.
D. Study other applications in your industry to see what strategies they are employing and replicate their approach.
Analysis
A specific group of users, previously highly active on the website, has recently shown a decline in visits. The team and stakeholders do not know why this is happening and want to investigate the root cause. The key focus should be on understanding user behavior and their pain points before jumping to potential solutions. As an Agile practitioner, the approach should prioritize user insights and iterative exploration over assumptions and premature solutions.
Analysis of Options
A: Organize a workshop with the team and stakeholders to collaboratively perform empathy mapping for this user group, exploring their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.
This is the best approach because it directly addresses the need to understand why users are disengaging. Empathy mapping is a structured design thinking tool that helps teams step into the users’ shoes, identifying their motivations, frustrations, and expectations. This method allows for deep exploration of the root cause of declining visits before taking action. Additionally, empathy mapping is explicitly mentioned in Agile frameworks as an effective way to gain user insights.
B: Conduct stakeholder interviews to gather their opinions on what might have caused the drop in user visits and use those insights to plan the next steps.
While interviewing stakeholders can provide valuable perspectives, it is a limited approach because it relies on assumptions rather than direct user insights. Stakeholders may have opinions, but they are not necessarily representative of the users themselves. Since empathy mapping (Option A) includes stakeholder input while also exploring actual user behavior, A is a more structured and comprehensive approach.
C: Experiment with new features designed to re-engage this user group and see which ones resonate best.
This option suggests jumping straight into experimentation without first understanding the root cause of user disengagement. Agile encourages iterative development and experimentation, but testing random features without first identifying the problem could lead to wasted effort. The priority should be to diagnose the problem first (e.g., through empathy mapping), then use experimentation to validate solutions.
D: Study other applications in your industry to see what strategies they are employing and replicate their approach.
Benchmarking competitors can provide insights into market trends, but it does not directly address why your users are disengaging. Simply replicating what others are doing may not resolve the unique challenges faced by this user group. Instead, a user-centered approach, such as empathy mapping, is necessary to uncover specific reasons behind the decline.
Conclusion
Option A is the best choice because it focuses on understanding user behavior before proposing solutions. Empathy mapping provides a structured way to gather user insights, ensuring that the next steps are based on real pain points rather than assumptions. While stakeholder interviews (Option B), experimentation (Option C), and industry benchmarking (Option D) have their places, they are secondary to first understanding the users’ motivations and frustrations. By applying user-centric Agile practices, the team can gain clarity and take data-driven actions to re-engage users effectively.
PMI – ACP Exam Content Outline Mapping
| Domain | Task |
| Mindset | Experiment Early |
| Mindset | Shorten Feedback Loops |
| Product | Visualize work |
Topics Covered:
- Understand user behavior through empathy mapping.
- Identify root causes of user disengagement.
- Avoid assumptions by gathering direct user insights.
- Improve stakeholder alignment on user needs.
- Use structured techniques for customer analysis.
- Prevent premature solutioning without diagnosing issues.
- Focus on data-driven decision-making.Use personas in backlog refinement for better prioritization.
- Increase transparency in feature development.
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