“What else?”

Ask “what else?” and keep asking until the room is silent.

Program management gets a bad rap at times. Ask twelve people what a program manager does and you will get a dozen different answers. The best description I ever heard was from a career talk during an internal Amazon technical program manager (TPM) conference: “I don’t know what program managers do, but things seem to go far better when they are around”.

One of the best TPMs I ever worked with had a pro-tip that he swore by. It is so simple that it seems obvious, but it is still a rare occurrence in meetings. After we had worked through the meeting agenda he would ask “ok, what else?”. That would inevitably lead to a missed agenda item that should have been discussed. “Great, thanks. What else?” Someone would volunteer that there was a risk that hadn’t been documented that should be. “Awesome, what else?” Suddenly an engineer would share that we need to talk with our third-party vendor. “Fantastic, what else?”

“What else?”

I am convinced that these two magic words have saved more projects than I have fingers.

Asking “what else” changes the focus of any meeting from simply completing the agenda to truly understanding the state of the project. It also communicates that the goal is to suss out all challenges and blockers, not just to check things off of a list. This subtle shift is powerful.

Don’t be a slave to your agenda. Focus on success of the project. Make sure that all challenges and blockers have been discussed. Ask “what else” until it hurts. Ask it three times in a row. Ask each person individually. Whatever it takes to get a shared understanding of ground truth.

Photo: Ball made of used bike tubes in Breckenridge, Colorado.