Your company is pursuing a market expansion strategy into three new geographic regions simultaneously. An agile product team has been working for four sprints on features designed for the North American market. Recent customer discovery sessions in the European and Asian markets reveal significantly different regulatory constraints, user preferences, and competitive dynamics that would require substantial rework of the current product direction. The team has completed 60% of the planned features for the North American release. The VP of Product wants to finish the North American features before addressing other markets to avoid 'scope creep,' while the VP of Sales insists all three markets must launch simultaneously in six months to meet investor commitments. What should you recommend?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is A. Option A is correct because it demonstrates agile's core principle of responding to change over following a plan, and aligns with the Business Environment domain's focus on market awareness and strategic alignment. The discovery of fundamental market differences represents new information that should drive decision-making; continuing down the original path creates waste and delays value realization across the strategic business objective (three-market expansion). Option B is the most common mistake because it feels less disruptive and honors sunk cost, but it delays learning and risks building the wrong product for two-thirds of the target market. Option C creates coordination overhead and likely results in three disconnected products, missing economies of scale. Option D is better than B but still sequences when parallel learning would be more valuable, and doesn't address that the current direction may be wrong for all three markets—the team should validate globally applicable features first.

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