PMI-ACP Practice Questions #71
You are part of a game development company called “Visionary Games,” which is struggling to align its teams toward a shared vision for a new multiplayer online game. Marketing teams from different regions have conflicting views on the game’s key features and priorities, leading to misalignment and wasted efforts. However, achieving buy-in from these marketing teams is critical, as they will ultimately be responsible for selling the product.
As the Product Owner, your primary goal is to build consensus on high-level features and a clear product vision. You need to ensure the marketing teams feel heard and contribute meaningfully while fostering collaboration and alignment.
What is the best course of action to achieve this goal?
A. Work with each marketing team individually to understand their priorities, then create a comprehensive document and decide.
B. Ask each marketing team to provide a detailed list of the features they want, compile these lists, and select the most common features for development.
C. Organize a Product Box Exercise with the marketing teams to identify shared priorities
D. Skip detailed conversations, run the first sprint to create a demo of the game’s first level and gather feedback afterward.
Analysis
The organization is facing misalignment among regional marketing teams regarding the key features and priorities of a new multiplayer online game. As the Product Owner, your goal is to align all stakeholders to a shared product vision while ensuring they feel heard and contribute meaningfully. Since marketing teams play a critical role in selling the game, their buy-in and collaboration are essential. The best approach should involve facilitated collaboration rather than isolated discussions, exhaustive documentation, or unilateral decision-making.
Analysis of Options
A: Work with each marketing team individually to understand their priorities, then create a comprehensive document and decide.
This approach may seem logical, as it attempts to gather input from all teams individually. However, it lacks collaboration and relies on a single decision-maker (the Product Owner) to consolidate the findings and make the final call. Agile promotes shared decision-making and collaboration rather than top-down control. Additionally, a comprehensive document is not necessarily the best way to drive alignment in an Agile environment, where priorities evolve dynamically. This option is not ideal.
B: Ask each marketing team to provide a detailed list of the features they want, compile these lists, and select the most common features for development.
This method introduces a structured way of gathering input but lacks real-time collaboration and discussion. Simply aggregating lists misses the nuances behind the priorities and does not encourage cross-team dialogue. Moreover, prioritizing features based on commonality rather than business value or alignment with the vision can lead to misplaced priorities. While slightly better than Option A, this approach is still too document-driven and predictive, making it suboptimal.
C: Organize a Product Box Exercise with the marketing teams to identify shared priorities.
This is the best option as it employs a collaborative and interactive approach to align marketing teams toward a shared product vision. A Product Box Exercise is a facilitated workshop where stakeholders collaboratively design a hypothetical product box showcasing the most important features and value propositions of the product. This technique encourages discussion, shared understanding, and collective decision-making. It ensures that all marketing teams feel heard while driving alignment and buy-in. Since the question explicitly asks for fostering collaboration and alignment, this is the most effective choice.
D: Skip detailed conversations, run the first sprint to create a demo of the game’s first level, and gather feedback afterward.
While building a working product and gathering feedback aligns with Agile principles, this approach bypasses early stakeholder alignment. The marketing teams are already misaligned, so simply delivering a demo without initial consensus could result in wasted effort and resistance. A clear shared vision must be established first to ensure subsequent iterations reflect stakeholder expectations. Agile encourages continuous feedback, but skipping collaboration upfront is a risky approach. Therefore, this option is not suitable.
Conclusion
The correct answer is Option C, as it fosters collaboration, builds alignment, and ensures stakeholder buy-in through an interactive Product Box Exercise. Option A is incorrect because it relies on isolated discussions and centralized decision-making. Option B is incorrect because it is document-heavy and lacks real-time collaboration. Option D is incorrect because it delays alignment and risks misdirected effort by skipping early discussions.
PMI – ACP Exam Content Outline Mapping
| Domain | Task |
| Leadership | Promote Agile Mindset Principles and Practices |
Topics Covered:
- Aligning stakeholders to a shared product vision through a collaborative Product Box Exercise.
- Ensuring Agile values of shared decision-making and collaboration over documentation-driven approaches.
- Encouraging early stakeholder engagement rather than waiting for feedback after development.
- Promoting iterative feedback to refine the product vision dynamically.
- Encouraging marketing teams to actively participate in defining priorities, reducing conflicts, and improving alignment.
- Fostering cross-team collaboration to enable shared learning and adaptability.
- Supporting team involvement in key product decisions rather than relying on a single decision-maker.
- Encouraging stakeholder engagement and active participation, reinforcing the Agile mindset of shared ownership and accountability.
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