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PMP Practice: Prioritize critical impediments, obstacles, and blockers for the team

Question 2 of 4 in Address and Remove Impediments, Obstacles, and Blockers for the Team

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River Okonkwo is the scrum master for Ubuntu Freight Corp, an indie game studio developing a multiplayer battle arena game. During sprint planning, the development team identifies that the legacy animation system is causing significant slowdowns—rendering tests now take 4 hours instead of 30 minutes, and three developers are blocked waiting for results before they can proceed with their tasks. The team proposes dedicating the entire sprint to refactoring the animation system. However, the product owner, Birch Petersen, insists the team must deliver two high-priority marketplace features this sprint because a major gaming convention is in three weeks, and the marketing team has already committed to demoing these specific features to potential publishers. Both the technical debt and the marketplace features are legitimate priorities. What should River do?
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Correct answer: Facilitate a collaborative discussion between the team and Dante to explore options such as splitting the work, delivering one marketplace feature with partial refactoring, or identifying an alternative demo plan that reduces immediate pressure

Explanation

In agile environments, the scrum master serves the team by removing impediments while also ensuring collaboration between the team and product owner. This scenario presents a genuine tradeoff: critical technical debt blocking developers versus committed marketplace features tied to a concrete business event. The best approach is to facilitate a collaborative problem-solving discussion that explores creative options—such as delivering one feature instead of two, doing partial refactoring to unblock developers while still making demo progress, or working with marketing to adjust the demo scope. This respects both the team's technical judgment and the product owner's business priorities while seeking a solution that addresses the most critical aspects of both concerns. The scrum master's role is to enable this collaboration, not to unilaterally decide technical versus business priorities.

**Why not A:** Siding with the product owner and directing the team to deliver marketplace features ignores the legitimate technical impediment of 4-hour rendering tests blocking three developers. Deferring the refactoring without exploring alternatives risks further velocity drops and may make the marketplace features themselves harder to deliver.

**Why not C:** Escalating to the studio director removes the team's ownership of the decision. In agile, the scrum master facilitates collaboration between the team and product owner to resolve competing priorities, and escalation should only occur when collaborative resolution has been exhausted.

**Why not D:** Supporting the development team's recommendation to prioritize refactoring over marketplace features ignores the product owner's legitimate business constraint of the gaming convention in three weeks. The scrum master should not take sides but rather facilitate exploration of options that might address both concerns.

Key Concept

This question covers Prioritize critical impediments, obstacles, and blockers for the team under Address and Remove Impediments, Obstacles, and Blockers for the Team (People).

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