PMP People — Leading Projects Practice Question
During a sprint review, the product owner expresses dissatisfaction with a feature delivered by the team, stating it does not meet the acceptance criteria. The team insists they followed the requirements as written. What should the project manager do FIRST?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates may jump to rework (Option A) or documentation updates (Option C) without first addressing the root cause—miscommunication—which is a common mistake in conflict resolution scenarios on the PMP exam.
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
✓
Facilitate a conversation between the product owner and the team to clarify the acceptance criteria.
The immediate priority is to resolve the misunderstanding between the product owner and the team. The project manager should facilitate a conversation to clarify the acceptance criteria, ensuring both parties have a shared understanding before any rework or documentation changes occur. This aligns with the PMP's focus on stakeholder engagement and conflict resolution within the 'People' domain.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Ask the team to redo the feature to meet the product owner's expectations.
Why it's wrong here
Immediately asking the team to redo the feature is premature and reactive. This action bypasses the critical step of understanding why the product owner is dissatisfied and what specific aspects of the feature failed to meet expectations. Without clarifying the underlying acceptance criteria or requirements, the team risks repeating the same misunderstanding and performing rework that still doesn't align with the product owner's true needs, leading to further delays and frustration.
- ✓
Facilitate a conversation between the product owner and the team to clarify the acceptance criteria.
Why this is correct
Facilitating a conversation directly addresses the ambiguity in the acceptance criteria, which is the root cause of the conflict. The project manager must first clarify the requirement definition before any corrective action, as the PMBOK® Guide prioritises stakeholder alignment over blame. This satisfies the constraint of unresolved criteria ambiguity, enabling the team and product owner to reconcile written requirements with expected outcomes.
- ✗
Update the project documents to reflect the product owner's new requirements.
Why it's wrong here
Updating project documents at this stage is premature because the root cause of the product owner's dissatisfaction has not been identified. It assumes "new requirements" rather than a potential misunderstanding or misinterpretation of existing, perhaps ambiguous, acceptance criteria. Documenting changes without first facilitating a conversation to clarify the actual discrepancy could lead to codifying a misunderstanding, rather than resolving the core issue of what "done" truly means for this feature.
- ✗
Refer to the project charter to determine the original scope.
Why it's wrong here
While the project charter defines high-level project objectives and overall scope, it lacks the granular detail necessary to resolve dissatisfaction regarding a specific feature's implementation during a sprint review. The charter provides strategic direction, but detailed functional requirements and acceptance criteria are found in the product backlog, user stories, or other detailed requirements documentation. Consulting the charter for feature-level specifics would be ineffective and misdirected, as it operates at a much higher level of abstraction.
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Related to this question
Learn chapter
Introduction to the PMP Exam and Project Management Basics
Key term
Project Management Plan
A formal, approved document that defines how a project is executed, monitored, controlled, and closed, serving as the single source of truth for the project team.
Key term
Project Team Management
Project Team Management is the process of leading, coordinating, and supporting a group of people to complete project tasks and achieve project objectives.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.