If you have the luxury of 2 people on a bug, having one on strategy & idea generation and the other down in the weeds confirming hypotheses and gathering data

If you have the luxury of 2 people on a bug, having one on strategy & idea generation and the other down in the weeds confirming hypotheses and gathering data is a common pattern. For some reason, not being on the keyboard or operating tools seems to free up a lot of mental bandwidth. Nothing gets done without someone being hands-on though so arguably yes, that role is more important. If there's just 1 person they usually have to stop and think really hard periodically and keep very good notes to avoid getting lost in the weeds.