It was a crew intensive jet. You truly needed good teamwork to get the job done, because one person couldn't handle everything themselves. This is coming from the perspective of someone who deployed with ICAP III, the newest iteration of the jet; it was worse in the earlier iterations. I don't mean that from a workload perspective (although the button pushing was a little more cumbersome), but instead from the way the switchology was set up. ECMO 1 (front right seat) was the only crew seat that could pass a HARM package to the missile, while ECMO 2 and 3 were the only ones that had access to the Master Radiate and Mini Rad switches (the way to radiate the jamming pods). An inexperienced crew or a weak crew member could lead to endless frustration, as coordination between the seats was paramount.
I definitely felt like more of a copilot in the Prowler than I do now. With the way the front cockpit was set up (no HUD, mostly non glass cockpit), a good ECMO 1 could really help out the pilot behind the boat. Also, the way the canopy was constructed prevented the pilot from seeing most of the right side, so ECMO 1 was a huge contributor to overall situational awareness. To that point, a good outside scan from the entire crew was important, as air to air situational awareness (outside of LINK 16 tracks) was almost non existent.
All that being said, I loved the Prowler. The side by side seating setup was great, and having four (or mostly three on our last deployment) people in the cockpit always made for good conversation. It may have taken longer to execute certain mission tasks, but the last iteration of the jamming and receiver suite was at least as capable as early iterations of the Growler, if not more so.