Test Online Free Scrum PAL-EBM Exam Questions and Answers
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A stakeholders sends a feedback to the Product Owner about the overall screen flows and navigation issues they have been facing while using the Product. The product owner translates this feedback into a list of enhancements. The scrum team works diligently on releasing the feature but despite an extensive marketing and promotional campaign, none of your customers are interested in using it.
What should the Product owner do? (Choose the best answer)
Answer: Explanation:
Customers (i.e. end users) are the most important stakeholders as they will be the ones using the product. A feature is built based on an assumption that it will solve a particular customer problem, so in this case, the assumption was incorrect. Investigating why the original hypothesis was incorrect will help provide a deeper understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.
Let's take a little more time to learn about hypothesis and hypothesis driven development. Hypothesis-driven development is based on a series of experiments to validate or disprove a hypothesis in a complex problem domain where we have unknown-unknowns. We want to find viable ideas or fail fast. Instead of developing a monolithic solution and performing a big-bang release, we iterate through hypotheses, evaluating how features perform and, most importantly, how and if customers use them. Template: We believe {customer/business segment} wants {product/feature/service} because {value proposition}.
Example: We believe that users want to be able to select different themes because it will result in improved user satisfaction. We expect 50% or more users to select a non-default theme and to see a 5% increase in user engagement.
Every experiment must be based on a hypothesis, have a measurable conclusion, and contribute to feature and overall product learning.
For each experiment, consider these steps:
Question 2Selectable Answer
A company in Germany uses NPS (Net Promoter Score) to understand the customers' satisfaction levels. Every year it sends a customer survey to the clients asking them if they would recommend the product to other. The team had invested a lot of time and effort creating and delivering a product increment that includes many new product features. This year, when the company sends out the survey and the NPS score still does not improve.
What other measures can help the company to better understand this outcome? (Choose the best two answers)
Answer: Explanation:
The Organization needs to begin by seeing why is the customer satisfaction not improving. This can be done by looking at the A2I area and Feature usage index is a good measure. Feature Usage Index helps to measure usage, by feature, to help infer the degree to which customers find the product useful and whether actual usage meets expectations on how long users should be taking with a feature.
Now it could also happen that the customers have just not reaped or realized the benefits of the new increment yet. Lead Time is the amount of time from when an idea is proposed, or a hypothesis is formed until a customer can benefit from that idea. This measure may vary based on customer and product. It is a contributing factor to customer satisfaction.
Release Frequency, Market share and installed versions are good measures but not useful in such scenarios.
Question 3Selectable Answer
You want to know the potential value that your product could, but does not yet, deliver.
Which of the following is the most helpful? (Choose the best answer)
Answer: Explanation:
Interviewing users who tried your product but did not buy, is a good way to obtain the potential value or unrealized value. Remember the Unrealized Value is the potential future value that could be realized if the organization met the needs of all potential customers or users. Looking at Unrealized Value helps an organization to maximize the value that it realizes from a product or service over time.
Question 4Selectable Answer
A product release is successful if it meets all stakeholder requirements.
Answer: Explanation:
A product release cannot be considered a success unless it improves the value experienced by its customers/users. It can’t be considered a success even if it meets all stakeholder requirements. There could be situations where all the Stakeholders requirements are met, however the stakeholder still does not have a good experience. Meeting all the requirements is not the same as customer value or customer being satisfied / happy / or having a good experience with the product.
Question 5Selectable Answer
Typically a strategic goal is big, far away, has many uncertainties along the journey and needs the use empiricism.
Answer: Explanation:
As the EBM guide states "A Strategic Goal, which is something important that the organization would like to achieve. This goal is so big and far away, with many uncertainties along the journey that the organization must use empiricism. Because the Strategic Goal is aspirational and the path to it is uncertain, the organization needs a series of practical targets, like Intermediate Goals, achievements of which will indicate that the organization is on the path to its Strategic Goal. The path to the Intermediate Goal is often still somewhat uncertain, but not completely unknown"
Question 6Selectable Answer
Members of development team in a Scrum project are concerned that a technical problem will cause a serious issue later. One team member points out that if the problem occurs, then they will need to find a different technical approach.
What should the team do next?
Answer: Explanation:
This team is concerned about a potential problem, but currently there has not been any actual impact on their project and there won't be an impact if the problem turns out not to exist. This is a good opportunity to perform exploratory work (which some people refer to as spike solutions). That’s a useful way for team to determine if a technical problem can be resolved, or if they need to find a different approach.
Question 7Selectable Answer
Who is best able to identify ideas that might enable organizations to make progress towards the goals?
Answer: Explanation:
Teams closest to the work itself, they are best able to identify ideas that might enable the organization to make progress toward their goals (set by executives / management). This is sometimes referred to as utilizing “bottom-up intelligence”. Framing Ideas into next steps as experiments with expected measures would make it easier to evaluate the experiment’s success when they start gathering data on its effectiveness.
Question 8Selectable Answer
A product is currently meeting your targets and goals. The board members in the organization are convinced that there is still a large share of potential customers in your product's market. The Sales Director advises you to reduce your product's price in order to attract those customers but the Finance Director argues that this would have a negative impact the product's profits.
What sources of information can help you decide on your product's pricing strategy? (Select three)
Answer: Explanation:
The Evidence-Based Management (EBM) approach measures value delivered as evidence of organizational agility, and provides ways to measure and improve the ability to deliver value. This approach enables organizations to make rational, fact-based decisions, elevating conversations from preferences and opinions to empirical evidence, logic, and insight.
The question is asking about factors which will help analyze the unrealized value of the product.
If you look at the chart above, measuring Customer Satisfaction will help you evaluate the product's
Current Value. Measuring market share and unmet needs will help you evaluate the product's
Unreleased Value. Using these data points, will help you make more informed pricing decisions
Question 9Selectable Answer
A Product Owner is considering to reduce the price of his product to be more competitive.
Which are the following options should be considered when deciding to drop the price? (Choose three).
Answer: Explanation:
The Product Owner is "going to" or "considering" which means he is trying to analyze the unrealized value. Measuring Customer Satisfaction helps you evaluate the product's Current Value. Measuring market share and unmet needs (Unmet Customer Needs) helps you evaluate the product's Unreleased Value.
Question 10Selectable Answer
After twenty years of running a product, the Board of Directors have decided to run the product in maintenance mode and have stopped funding. The firm has started searching for other opportunities in the market.
What could be the reason? (Choose the best answer).
Answer: Explanation:
Although revenue is currently high, there are clear signs that the product has passed its maximum maturity (it has been running ten years in the market) and is now declining. There would also be low profits from continuous investment.
For example, a product may have a low Current Value (CV) because it is an early version being used to test the market, but a very high Unrealized Value (UV) might indicate great market potential. Investing in the product that can boost CV is probably warranted, given the potential returns, even though it is not currently producing high CV.
Question 11Selectable Answer
A Scrum Team (Lifeline) completed 80 story points of work in two weeks. Another Team (Pacemakers) completed 40 story points of work in one week.
Which team delivered more value?
Answer: Explanation:
The value of the work is measured by the value experienced by the customer. Velocity is a measure of the amount of work that a team can do. This is not the same as measuring the value or impact of this work.
A team can have a high velocity however the increment can result into less or no value for the customer and on the other hand another team can make a small tweak to the product (less work) which could produce high value for the customer.
Question 12Selectable Answer
Which of the following would be a valid reason for an organization to consider implementing experiments?
Answer: Explanation:
Running experiments helps in learning about complex problems, gaining knowledge to make informed decisions, and allows teams to see the impact/outcome of their work.
Question 13Selectable Answer
EBM-PM (Portfolio management) seeks to reduces risk by investing in small increments, and then monitoring the results of these on frequent intervals.
Answer: Explanation:
EBM-PM seeks to improve business results by reducing waste and over-investment in work that adds little or no business value. It reduces risk by investing in small increments, and then monitoring the results of these on frequent intervals.
Improving business impact requires delivering products and services that help customers achieve better outcomes, within a window of opportunity, for a reasonable price, at an acceptable level of cost. Since the world is uncertain, you can’t plan what customers need upfront, or what they are willing to pay, and since one can’t predict what customers will need, one can’t predict how much it will cost. This is why an organization need to work iteratively and empirically in order to achieve superior business results. Running focused experiments is the only way to move ahead in an uncertain world.
Question 14Selectable Answer
Which are the three types of goals described in the Evidence-Based Management framework? (Choose three)
Answer: Explanation:
Complex problems require organizations seek solutions toward in a series of small steps, inspecting the results of each step, and adapting their next actions based on feedback. This model has several key elements:
Question 15Selectable Answer
An organization is responsible for the marketing of cars. The CEO of the company realizes that the product’s sales are falling behind competitors. The CEO has no clue as to why this is happening.
Which Key Value Areas would give the organization the best insight into what to do next? (Choose two answers)
Answer: Explanation:
To begin with the organization should start with focusing on what the product is currently delivering to the customers and whether it can be improved. This can be done by looking at the CV.
Next, the organization should also check if the customers have unmet needs that the competitors are able to meet. This can be done by looking at the Unrealized Value.
Current Value (CV) reveals the value that the product delivers to customers, as of today. The Goal of looking at CV is to maximize the value that an organization delivers to customers and stakeholders at the present time.
Unrealized Value suggests the potential future value that could be realized if the organization could meet the needs of all potential customers or users. When customers, users, or clients experience a gap between their current experience and the experience that they would like to have, the difference between the two represents an opportunity; this opportunity is measured by Unrealized Value. The goal of looking at Unrealized Value is for the organization to maximize the value that it realizes from a product or service over time.
The consideration of both CV and UV provides organizations with a way to balance present and possible future benefits. Strategic Goals are formed from some satisfaction gap and an opportunity for an organization to decrease UV by increasing CV.
Example: A product may have low CV, because it is an early version being used to test the market, but very high UV, indicating that there is great market potential. Investing in the product to try to boost CV is probably warranted, given the potential returns, even though the product is not currently producing high CV.
Conversely, a product with very high CV, large market share, no near competitors, and very satisfied customers may not warrant much new investment; this is the classic cash cow product that is very profitable but nearing the end of its product investment cycle with low UV.
