A Team of Product Thinkers Decides as One

Press Release

Facilitator-seeded draft (2026-07-25 role-ownership review) — the product thinkers own the final press-release framing.

The product thinker can be a team. Each thinker takes their own thinking session — the same interview a solo thinker gets, wherever they work, on their own time — and abcd collates the authored inputs into one joint proposal: agreements merged with citations, disagreements surfaced side-by-side with their authors' names, nothing averaged into mush. The team then holds one collective discussion over that proposal and records the decision. Throughout, abcd never asks a product thinker to make a technical decision — only to decide on a clear proposal that names its options, its recommendation, and its price.

"Alice, Bob and I each wrote our version of the why separately," said Carol. "The joint proposal showed where the three of us actually disagreed — two places, not the ten we expected. The discussion took an hour, the decision is on record with all three names on it, and my dissent about scope is preserved next to the adoption instead of papered over."

Why This Matters

The governing assumption is already doctrine: a verdict is a proposal and the human's adoption is the gate (verifier-selects-gates-decide); itd-41 phases roadmaps as decide-knowing-the-price proposals; itd-90 hands a product thinker an interview whose answers land authored-by a named person on a date. But everything shipped and recorded assumes one product thinker. Three things are missing, in dependency order:

1. A participant model — abcd has no representation of multiple named humans (personas.json holds the fictional Alice/Bob/Carol; attribution knows one maintainer).
2. Person-keyed thinking sessions — the itd-90 interview pattern, extended so each thinker's input is captured separately and stamped as theirs.
3. Collation and decision machinery — the press-release-composer already composes one grounded document from many sources under cite-or-be-dropped, and itd-81 supplies the independence discipline a human panel equally needs; neither is wired to human inputs.

What's In Scope

• The participant model: named product thinkers with authorship stamping; every team-workflow artefact records who wrote what, when.
• Individual thinking sessions: per-person interviews (itd-90 pattern) captured independently — thinkers do not see each other's answers before writing their own (independence before aggregation, per itd-81's rationale).
• Automatic collation into a joint proposal: cite-or-be-dropped against the authored inputs; agreements merged with citations; disagreements listed as first-class items with their authors; uncited synthesis dropped.
• The proposal contract for teams: any technical choice in the joint proposal is framed as options + recommendation + stated costs — never a question requiring technical design from a thinker.
• The decision record: the collective discussion's outcome lands with named adopters, the date, and dissent preserved verbatim beside the adoption.

What's Out of Scope

• Real-time meeting/chat tooling — the discussion happens wherever the team talks; abcd records its outcome, not its transcript.
• Voting and quorum arithmetic in v1 — a decision is a recorded adoption, not a vote count.
• Agent-to-agent coordination — itd-33 owns agents; this intent is about humans.
• Facilitator staffing — works identically under duo or solo (itd-97).

Acceptance Criteria

• Given three thinkers each complete an individual session, when collation runs, then exactly one joint proposal lands in which every claim cites the authored input(s) it came from and every disagreement is listed with its authors — uncited synthesis is dropped, not kept.
• Given a joint proposal contains a technical choice, when it is presented to the team, then it appears as options with a recommendation and stated costs, never as an open technical question.
• Given the collective discussion concludes, when the decision is recorded, then it names the adopters and the date and preserves any recorded dissent verbatim alongside the adoption.
• Given a named participant's session is missing, when collation is attempted, then the gap is loud (the missing participant is named) — never a silent smaller-team proposal.
• Given an individual session's content, when it appears anywhere downstream (proposal, brief, decision), then it is stamped as authored by that person on that date, never disguised as something extracted from the repository (itd-90 symmetry).

SOTA

Surveyed on 2026-10-23; sources, evidence tiers and the local fit risks are in the elicitation interviews SOTA note.

• Independence before aggregation is measured: social influence "diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error" and "boosts individuals' confidence … despite lack of improved accuracy" (Lorenz et al., PNAS 2011). No shared pre-read.
• The one large trial of machine collation used this protocol: private opinions, a machine draft, private critiques, a revised draft; 5,734 participants preferred the machine statements to a human mediator's 56 per cent of the time, and the report describes the successful statements as carrying the dissenting views while keeping the majority position (MIT Technology Review, October 2024; the journal paper was unreachable, so no wording is quoted). The protocol shape, not the fine-tuned model, is what transfers to two to four thinkers.
• Off-the-shelf summarisers "risk underrepresenting minority perspectives" and are order-dependent, and "LLMs as judges … show weak alignment with human judgments" on exactly this (Zhu et al., 2025): each thinker confirms their own position's rendering; no model judges whether a minority view survived.
• Standing bodies decide by addressed objections, not counts: "Lack of disagreement is more important than agreement", "the existence of the unaddressed open issue, not the number of people, is determinative", "Hums should not be used as votes" (RFC 7282); consent passes what is "good enough for now and safe enough to try" and separates an objection from a concern (Sociocracy 3.0). "Addressed, but not necessarily accommodated" is the closing test that matches "no voting arithmetic".
• Dissent is recorded structurally where it is recorded at all: Rust's "@rfcbot concern NAME_OF_CONCERN", where "only the original author can mark their concern as resolved"; PEP 1's "rejected ideas should be recorded along with the reasoning". The single-approver frameworks (RAPID, DACI, MADR) have no dissent slot and end in one decider, which is not what this intent promises.
• Tension with the seeded press release: it has the joint proposal name "its recommendation"; widen-options-never-recommend binds any conjectural question put to a product thinker, while a priced technical choice is the facilitator's to recommend. Recorded for the product thinker, who owns the press release.

Path 2: a native protocol shaped to the trial and to rfcbot, extending the press-release composer's cite-or-be-dropped collation rather than adding a collator; private sessions, an attributed draft, private per-thinker confirmation, author-owned concerns that only their author clears, RFC 7282's closing test, and a decision record with adopters, date and each concern's verbatim text; participants as handles mapped in an uncommitted local file, with PROV's actedOnBehalfOf for a relayed answer. No Go dependency.

The independent fit-challenge runs at plan time.

Open Questions

• Where do participants live, and the privacy collision: the PII discipline forbids committing real names/emails, yet authorship stamping wants named humans in the record. A deliberate carve-out (participants opt in to being named in their own repo) or an indirection (participant ids mapped in an uncommitted local file)? This must be settled before any schema exists.
• Async vs. sync — is the collective discussion an artefact the team edits asynchronously, or a session whose outcome one person records?
• Dissent and the lifecycle — can a dissenting thinker block planning, or is adoption by the recorded decision rule always sufficient?
• Collation engine home — transpose the press-release-composer agent, or a new dedicated collation agent? (One-canonical-primitive says extend.)
• (SOTA 2026-10-23) Whether a concern that its author has not cleared blocks planning by being unaddressed, or whether the decision rule may declare it "in the rough" once answered, as RFC 7282 allows a chair to do.

Audit Notes

Empty. Populated by intent-fidelity-reviewer when intent moves to shipped/.

References

• itd-90 (brief-interview-for-the-blanks) — the authored-answer, role-separated interview pattern this extends from one thinker to many.
• itd-41 (phase negotiator) — decide-knowing-the-price proposals.
• .abcd/development/principles/verifier-selects-gates-decide.md — the decision contract, unchanged for teams: the collated proposal is the verdict; the team's adoption is the gate.
• .abcd/development/intents/disciplines/itd-81-judge-calibration.md — independence-before-aggregation, transposed from LLM judges to human panels.
• itd-97, itd-98 — the sibling drafts filed with this one.