Week 1 Lab: Demo vs. Skeptical PM

A two-person roleplay where one of you demos "done" software and the other is paid to not believe you

22 February 2027

Pairs. In each pair, one person demos a piece of software they’ve actually built (a uni project, a personal repo, anything with a UI you can click through) as though it were finished. The other plays a skeptical product manager whose entire job this lab is to not be satisfied — asking what happens on a bad network, an empty state, a second user, a typo in the input field. If you don’t have your own project handy, swap: demo a classmate’s.

Before the lab#

Bring something you can actually run and click through — rough is fine, “finished” is not required and is, honestly, the wrong thing to bring to a lab about the gap between the two. Read week 1’s lecture first; the PM’s whole brief is to go looking for exactly the gap it describes.

In the lab#

Ten minutes to demo, ten minutes of PM interrogation, then switch roles and do it again with the other person’s project. The PM’s job isn’t to be mean — it’s to make the specific, nameable case for why “it works” and “it works for someone who isn’t you, watching” are different claims.

Submitting#

One page, from the pair: the gaps the PM actually found, and — this is the part markers care about — which of them the developer says they’d genuinely missed if nobody had asked. Due Friday 26 February, 5pm.

Work in pairs of two for this one.