Pair-Product-Managing

Developers have multiple ways of helping each other: pair programming, code review... Shouldn't Product Managers have the same thing?

This goes beyond lite Community of Practice discussion. Conversely, ideally this is less about peer review than co-creation.

(I first noticed this need in 2017, it's been percolating since...)

who?

• A 1-on-1 between a PM and his boss can work, though the power-differential creates issues....
• 2 peer PMs can do it
• a PM with a Designer
• a PM with a dev who's interested, or the team dev-lead
• it could be more than 2 people, but more gets worse fast

There should be reciprocity (via separate sessions, don't round-robin during 1 session).

Doing this regularly builds a lot of shared context. (Strategic context and micro.)

"Final" "review", "reality-check", "2nd set of eyes" is all less effective than early collaboration. But, contrary to what I wrote above, it's not really equal co-creation.... so Primary should have chunk of thinking/work done in advance.

Some approaches/prompts....

• is this solving the most important Problem? How do we know?
• what other Solutions to the Problem have been considered? Let's generate some new ones! And/or let's discuss whether this is really better than the Rejects.
• what Hypothesis are we treating as a Fact? Can we restate it as a Bet with odds?
• is there any data we have, or could collect with the almost no work, that would validate our most important hypotheses?
• there are an infinite number of templates/frameworks: which one didn't you use this time, which might be useful? PR/FAQ? Pre-mortem? Let's do it together.
• what's the biggest risk here? What can we do to validate/manage/reduce that risk? Is there a smaller piece that should be release1? Is there an alternative to building?