PMP Process — Managing Technical Aspects Practice Question
During a sprint planning meeting, the product owner wants to add a high-priority user story that the team believes is too large to complete in one sprint. What should the team do?
⚠ Common exam trap
PMP often tests the misconception that the team should simply accept or refuse a story based on size, rather than collaborating with the product owner to refine it. The trap is choosing an action that avoids collaboration or violates Agile principles of sustainable pace and iterative delivery.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Work with the product owner to break the story down into smaller, manageable pieces
In Agile/Scrum, large user stories that cannot be completed in a single sprint are typically split into smaller, independent stories that deliver incremental value. The team should collaborate with the product owner to decompose the story into manageable pieces that fit within the sprint's capacity. This preserves the sprint goal, maintains sustainable pace, and allows for continuous delivery of value. Option C is the correct answer because it aligns with Agile principles of collaboration and iterative delivery.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Accept the story and work overtime to complete it
Why it's wrong here
Agile principles emphasize a sustainable pace and predictable delivery, making planned overtime an unsustainable practice. Accepting an oversized story and immediately resorting to overtime indicates a failure in proper sprint planning and a disregard for the team's long-term well-being and productivity. This approach often leads to burnout, decreased quality, and ultimately undermines the team's ability to deliver consistently and predictably.
- ✗
Ask the product owner to attend the daily standups for this sprint only
Why it's wrong here
While a Product Owner's presence at daily standups can certainly foster communication and help clarify ongoing impediments, it fundamentally does not address the core issue of an oversized user story during sprint planning. The purpose of sprint planning is to ensure stories are "ready" and appropriately sized for the sprint, which is a proactive measure. Attending standups might provide reactive clarification but won't magically break down a large story into sprint-sized chunks or make it fit the sprint capacity.
- ✓
Work with the product owner to break the story down into smaller, manageable pieces
Why this is correct
This is the most appropriate and collaborative agile response. During sprint planning, if a user story is deemed too large to fit within the sprint's capacity, the development team must work directly with the Product Owner to refine and split it into smaller, independent, valuable, and estimable user stories. This ensures the work is manageable, maintains a sustainable pace, and allows for incremental delivery and valuable feedback within the sprint.
- ✗
Refuse to accept the story because it is too large
Why it's wrong here
Simply refusing a user story outright without engaging in collaborative problem-solving is counterproductive and goes against the foundational principles of agile teamwork. The development team and Product Owner are expected to work together to achieve sprint goals and refine the product backlog. A direct refusal without attempting to decompose or refine the story fails to leverage the collective intelligence and problem-solving capabilities inherent in a high-performing scrum team.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Leading Teams and Empowering Team Members
Key term
Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning is a time-boxed meeting at the start of a Scrum sprint where the team decides what work they can deliver and how they will do it.
Key term
Scrum Methodology
Scrum is a lightweight process framework that helps teams deliver complex projects in small, iterative chunks called sprints.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every PMP question from scratch — 820 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official PMI exam blueprint
This PMP practice question is part of Courseiva's free PMI certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PMP exam.