PSPO-II practice question 11 of 15

You are the Product Owner for a product with diverse stakeholders with differing opinions that sometimes conflict. Your Director of Marketing…

Choose your answer, then check it against the explanation.

Domain Managing Products with Agility

You are the Product Owner for a product with diverse stakeholders with differing opinions that sometimes conflict. Your Director of Marketing strongly believes that you should add a major new feature to reach a new market. Your CEO believes that the new feature is too expensive and thinks you should focus on other features to make existing customers happier. The CEO says that as Product Owner it is ultimately your decision. You think both perspectives have merit, but you cannot do both. How should you proceed? (choose the best answer)

Answer options

Correct Answer:

Explanation

The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing product value, which involves making difficult decisions under uncertainty. Both the CEO and the Director of Marketing present valid but conflicting opinions. Instead of choosing one opinion over the other, the best course of action is to apply empiricism. Devising an experiment to test the hypothesis that the new feature will succeed in a new market is a core agile and lean practice. This approach allows the Product Owner to gather data and evidence, reducing risk and enabling a decision based on validated learning rather than solely on stakeholder influence. This aligns with the Scrum value of courage to tackle tough problems and the principle of evidence-based management.

Why Incorrect

B. Trusting one stakeholder's opinion is a high-risk gamble that ignores the empirical nature of Scrum and the PO's accountability for making informed, value-based decisions.

C. While gathering more information is part of the process, this option is less effective than A because it focuses on collecting more opinions rather than generating empirical evidence through an experiment.

D. Deferring to the CEO's opinion, even if well-intentioned, abdicates the PO's explicit accountability for the Product Backlog and making the final decision on its content.

References

1. Schwaber

& Sutherland

J. (2020). The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org. (p. 5). The guide states

"The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team." This accountability requires making decisions based on the best available information

not just authority. The guide's foundation in empiricism (p. 3) supports testing assumptions.

2. Scrum.org. (2020). The Evidence-Based Management Guide. (p. 6

"Experiment Loop"). The guide explicitly promotes an iterative approach: "An organization forms a hypothesis... then it conducts an experiment to test the hypothesis... The results of the experiment provide new evidence." This directly supports option A.

3. McGreal

& Jocham

R. (2018). The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage. Addison-Wesley Professional. (Chapter 7

"Value"). The authors discuss the PO's role in navigating uncertainty and using techniques like hypothesis testing and experiments to validate assumptions about value before making large investments.

4. Bosch

& Olsson

H. H. (2016). Data-driven continuous evolution of software-intensive systems. IEEE Software

33(3)

19-22. (p. 20). This academic article discusses the shift from opinion-based to data-driven decision-making in software development

advocating for techniques like A/B testing and experimentation to validate hypotheses about new features. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2016.74

Question 11 of 15

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