Using an agile approach, the product owner marks a backlog item as high business value and easy to implement. The team identifies a strong dependency on another backlog item that has low business value and high complexity. How should the project manager support backlog prioritization?

The project manager, in an agile environment, acts as a servant leader and facilitator. Their role is not to dictate prioritization but to guide the team and product owner to a shared understanding and decision. Facilitating a discussion allows the team to explore the dependency, potential solutions (like refactoring or re-sequencing), and the impact of different choices on value delivery. Moving both items to the next sprint without a clear plan risks bringing low-value, complex work into the sprint unnecessarily. Prioritizing only the high-value item ignores the critical dependency, potentially leading to incomplete work. Prioritizing the low-value, high-complexity item solely due to dependency without further discussion contradicts agile principles of delivering high value first.