The executive leadership of an agile company has launched a new strategy.

In an Agile environment, when leadership introduces a new strategy that changes what features matter most, the team should reprioritize the backlog. Agile delivery relies on an ordered backlog to ensure the team builds the highest-value work first, and strategic shifts are handled by re-ranking upcoming features so the next iterations deliver what best supports the organization’s direction. CompTIA Project+ covers Agile concepts and emphasizes adapting plans and work sequencing based on stakeholder needs and business priorities.

The other options don’t fit the immediate Agile response. Resource loading is more about capacity assignment across tasks; it may happen after reprioritization, but it’s not the first move when strategy changes. Critical path analysis is a scheduling technique most associated with predictive planning and isn’t the primary mechanism to respond to changing feature priorities in Agile. Contingency reserves address risk buffers for schedule/cost uncertainty, not strategic feature changes.

Therefore, the team should update the backlog order (often with the product owner and stakeholders), clarify acceptance criteria for the newly important features, and then plan upcoming sprints based on that revised priority list.