How do you navigate separating what from how with a prescriptive PO?

WHAT THIS TESTS: Your grasp of Scrum accountabilities and the line between Product Owner and Developers. The Scrum Guide states the Product Owner orders the Product Backlog to maximize value, while Developers are self-managing and accountable for creating a usable Increment each Sprint. The interviewer wants to see if you know that prescribing implementation in a user story violates Developer autonomy, and whether you can correct this through transparency and collaboration rather than conflict.

A GOOD ANSWER COVERS: First, acknowledge the PO's goal and validate the intent so the conversation stays respectful. Second, reframe the user story around the outcome and value, stripping away the prescribed implementation to expose the real WHAT. Third, cite the Scrum Guide's division of labor: PO owns ordering and value, Developers own how the work is performed. Fourth, bring the simpler solution to Sprint Planning or backlog refinement as a transparent proposal with concrete tradeoffs, such as reduced cycle time, lower maintenance cost, or higher reliability, while confirming it still meets the user outcome. Fifth, agree on acceptance criteria together so the PO retains control over whether the outcome is correct without dictating the path to get there.

COMMON WRONG ANSWERS: Saying the team should just build exactly what the PO wrote because the PO is the boss. This ignores Developer self-management and turns the team into an order-taking unit. Conversely, saying the engineers should simply override the PO and build the better solution anyway destroys trust and transparency. Another red flag is moving the conversation to email or escalating to management before attempting direct collaboration within the Scrum event cadence.

LIKELY FOLLOW-UPS: What if the PO is a former engineer and insists their solution is better? How would you handle this if the simpler solution changes the user experience? What Scrum event is the right place to have this conversation, and why? How do you prevent this situation from recurring?

ONE CONCRETE EXAMPLE: The PO writes a story saying the checkout flow must use a specific third-party API integration to calculate tax. The team knows the platform already has a native tax engine that is simpler and more robust. In refinement, you thank the PO for the clear scenario, rewrite the story to state that the checkout must calculate tax accurately for five jurisdictions, and present a two-minute spike result showing the native engine covers all five with one-tenth the latency. The PO agrees to update the acceptance criteria, and the team selects the item in Sprint Planning with full alignment.