Agile Business Analysis Strategy Horizon Analysis 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A business analyst uses the Three Horizons model. Horizon 1 activities are best characterized as:
- Exploring entirely new business models with uncertain ROI
- Sustaining and defending core business profitability (Correct answer)
- Incubating emerging opportunities just beyond current scope
- Experimenting with disruptive technologies at scale
Correct answer: Sustaining and defending core business profitability
Horizon 1 focuses on extending and defending the core business to sustain current profitability.
Question 2: In Agile strategy horizon analysis, which artifact best captures trade-offs between short-term delivery and long-term capability building?
- Sprint backlog
- Product roadmap
- Architecture runway (Correct answer)
- Definition of Done
Correct answer: Architecture runway
The architecture runway represents the pre-built technical capability that balances immediate features with future scalability.
Question 3: A company's Horizon 3 initiative fails to transition into Horizon 2. The MOST likely Agile BA intervention is to:
- Immediately retire the initiative and reallocate budget
- Conduct a feasibility spike and reassess market signals (Correct answer)
- Promote the initiative to the core product backlog
- Convert the initiative into a permanent innovation lab
Correct answer: Conduct a feasibility spike and reassess market signals
A feasibility spike helps validate assumptions and reassess whether market signals support continued investment.
Question 4: Which planning cadence aligns MOST closely with Horizon 2 strategy work in a scaled Agile framework?
- Daily stand-up
- Sprint retrospective
- Portfolio Kanban review
- Program Increment planning (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Program Increment planning
Program Increment (PI) planning operates at the right cadence to coordinate emerging opportunities that need cross-team alignment.
Question 5: A BA facilitates a strategy horizon workshop. Participants keep placing initiatives in multiple horizons. The BEST facilitation response is to:
- Force a single-horizon assignment by majority vote
- Clarify that horizons represent time-to-maturity, not importance (Correct answer)
- Remove ambiguous initiatives from the exercise
- Allow dual-horizon assignments to reflect portfolio complexity
Correct answer: Clarify that horizons represent time-to-maturity, not importance
Clarifying that horizons reflect maturity timelines, not value ranking, resolves the most common misclassification error.
Question 6: How does Lean Portfolio Management in SAFe use horizon thinking when allocating capacity?
- It assigns fixed percentage budgets to each of the three horizons (Correct answer)
- It uses horizon labels only for marketing narrative, not funding decisions
- It aligns Epic types (Business, Enabler) to horizon investment buckets
- It restricts Horizon 3 funding to external venture capital only
Correct answer: It assigns fixed percentage budgets to each of the three horizons
Lean Portfolio Management typically sets percentage-based investment allocations across horizons to balance exploitation and exploration.
Question 7: A product owner argues that a Horizon 3 experiment should follow the same Definition of Done as core features. The BA should explain that:
- Horizon 3 work requires stricter quality gates due to higher risk
- Experiments need a lighter-weight validated-learning DoD, not a shippable-product DoD (Correct answer)
- Horizon 3 initiatives have no definition of done until they graduate to Horizon 2
- The same DoD ensures consistency across all portfolio items
Correct answer: Experiments need a lighter-weight validated-learning DoD, not a shippable-product DoD
Horizon 3 experiments should be judged by validated learning outcomes, not production-readiness standards.
Agile Business Analysis Strategy Horizon Analysis 2
A business analyst uses the Three Horizons model.
Horizon 1 activities are best characterized as: