Firstly, I think this is a common ground between software development and PM but believe I have posted this in the right community.

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I have been recently coming into this situation more and more and wanted to know of a solution or recommendation from people have who have experienced this situation.

We use Jira to define our tasks and have acceptance criteria (AC) that are defined by our Product Manager (PM). When a developer works on a task, they have to achieve the result of the AC and that is reviewed by the PM.

Recently, we have had a few situations where the PM has decided that whilst the AC has been met, the code should not reach production as it does not deliver a suitable enough value to our user. This means that we have a situation of limbo where both the card and the code sit whilst the PM decides how best to resolve the problem.

I wanted to gather some thoughts on what the best practice for this is. I personally do not believe in shipping a product that is of negative value to the user, but also believe that holding features in limbo and producing a potential for merge hell is not great for our development team when the AC was clearly met.