Lately, I've been trying and reviewing modern AI agent tools that can write code, create designs and build full working products. While doing that, I realised PMs need to steal another practice from the engineering playbook - peer reviews.
Peer review definition
The peer review process is a method used to evaluate the quality, validity, and originality of academic or professional work before it is published or shared. It involves experts in the same field (peers) reviewing and providing feedback on the work to ensure it meets established standards.
Why do PMs need PRs?
There are many benefits to having your work PR reviewed:- To increase the quality of the work
- To learn from one another
- To get your colleagues familiar with your work and give them new ideas
What to peer review as a PM?
Basically, you can peer review everything, but you don't have to. It's better to audit and outline the optimisation opportunities for your product organisation and try peer review there first.Decisions
Arguably, the most important PM activity is making decisions. Some decisions could be absolutely critical to PM's organisations. Hence, decision-making is a good candidate for peer review. Surely you don't need to review each and every tiny decision. PMs should be able to distinguish decisions based on the possible impact and risks associated. More impactful and/or risky decisions should go through a peer review process. Business-critical decisions might require a few layers of review, for example: peer review + leadership review.Data and insights
All of us, PMs, work with data. We analyse the data available and extract insights that inform our decisions. The peer review process could be beneficial here, as your peer can spot insights you missed, help you catch errors in your analysis, and make you aware of more data you haven't considered. Moreover, by peer reviewing the data work, you increase the overall data literacy of your entire product org that could only have benefits for the entire business.Presentations
Another popular PM task - giving presentations. Peer review comes in handy here as well. You can ask your colleagues to review your deck, dry run the presentation with them and collectively find better ways to communicate. There's no better way to get better at presenting than to do it often. And if you build a culture of feedback, your entire org will get better at communicating, which will have a massive positive effect on your business.Comms
All top PMs out there are master communicators. They know their audience, can craft the right message and deliver it through the most effective medium to get the impact they are after. This kind of mastery comes from years of practice and tons of mistakes made. The peer review process can help speed up the road to communication mastery and make it less painful (when you inevitably get it wrong).Consider splitting comms based on audience or risk and applying different peer review requirements to each. For example, your internal comms to stakeholders might be less risky, and so an informal "can you look at my email" peer review might apply. While something more risky, like an external communication or a press release, might require a more formal peer review process.
Processes and tools
Like many other professions, product management has different flavours, ways of working and PMs' favourite tools to get the job done. These days, there are so many processes you can follow and tools you can employ that it's getting ever more difficult to know what's even out there. The best product teams are constantly learning from each other. They experiment with novel processes, try out new tools and tweak their behaviour in a thousand different ways to get better results.Regular peer reviews come in very handy here, as the entire product org can upskill much faster than each individual PM.
Summary
Peer review is a powerful process that product managers can apply to improve the quality of their work, learn from one another and be more in the know about what the entire product org is doing. Peer reviews could be added to any PM activities, however, it makes sense to start from the most critical processes and from the biggest learning opportunities.
And finally, a PM job could often feel lonely, and given that you like your colleagues, peer reviews could give you an excuse to spend some time with your product buddies.