You are leading a Scrum team developing a customer relationship management (CRM) system. During sprint planning, the product owner presents a high-priority user story estimated at 21 story points, which exceeds the team's average velocity of 35 points per two-week sprint. The product owner insists this feature is critical for an upcoming sales conference in three weeks and must be completed in the next sprint. Several team members suggest breaking down the story, but the product owner argues that all components must be delivered together to be valuable. How should you proceed?

Question

Accepted Answer

The correct answer is B. Facilitating decomposition of the large story into smaller, independently valuable increments allows the team to deliver the most critical functionality first while maintaining sustainable pace and sprint predictability. This approach honors agile principles of incremental delivery and sustainable pace while still addressing the business need. The key is working collaboratively with the product owner to identify vertical slices that provide some value even if not all components are complete. Option A violates the principle of sustainable pace and doesn't address the underlying sizing issue. Option C is too rigid and doesn't serve the collaborative spirit needed between the product owner and team. Option D delays value delivery and doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the story being too large for a single sprint.

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