Tools & Frameworks

Operating principles (my defaults)

Write to think. A one-page narrative beats a 40-slide deck.
Keep the toolkit small. A few repeatable artifacts create alignment faster than “the latest tool”.
Make trade-offs explicit. The job is not to avoid conflict; it’s to surface the real decision.
Measure outcomes. Shipping features is input; customer value and business impact are the output.

Problem brief (1 page). Who has the pain, what job they’re trying to do, current workflow, constraints, success metric.
Decision memo. Options, pros/cons, risks, who disagrees and why, decision, and what would change my mind.
PR/FAQ or narrative. The “future press release” and the hardest FAQs from sales/support/security.
Beta charter. Entry criteria, what we’re learning, what we won’t do, timeline, and success thresholds.
Launch readiness checklist. Instrumentation, docs, enablement, support plan, rollback.

Segmentation + ICP. Which customers get outsized value and why (budget, urgency, compliance, complexity)?
Positioning. Category, differentiated capability, and “why now”. (April Dunford’s style is practical.)
North Star metric. One metric that best represents delivered value; supporting metrics guard against gaming.
Portfolio thinking. How products reinforce each other (bundles, shared platform, shared data, shared workflow).
Strategic bets. A small number of explicit bets with hypotheses, investment level, and kill criteria.

Jobs-to-be-done. The job, triggers, anxieties, and what “progress” looks like for the customer.
Journey mapping. Where the workflow breaks, where context is missing, and what’s manual.
Opportunity solution tree. Keeps ideation anchored to opportunities and evidence.
Continuous discovery cadence. Weekly touchpoints with users beat occasional “research sprints”.
Prototype tests. Cheap tests: concierge, Wizard-of-Oz, Figma flows, fake doors, limited pilot.

I avoid pretending prioritization is math. Frameworks are for clarity, not false precision.

RICE. Good for getting alignment on assumptions; I treat confidence as a forcing function.
Cost vs impact. The simplest chart often produces the fastest decision.
MoSCoW. Useful when scope discipline is the real problem.
Sequencing over ranking. “What must be true first?” is often more important than “what’s #1?”.
Strategic constraints. Security, compliance, platform readiness, and GTM capacity are real constraints.

Outcome-based roadmaps. Themes and outcomes, not an infinite list of features.
Dual-track. Discovery and delivery run in parallel with clear handoffs.
Definition of done. Includes instrumentation, docs, support readiness, and learnings captured.
Beta strategy. Start with friendly users who feel the pain and can give high-quality feedback.
Kill switches. Rollback paths and feature flags for safe iteration.

Drafting. First drafts for briefs, FAQs, and release notes — then edited to reflect customer truth.
Synthesis. Summaries of calls and tickets to speed up pattern finding (never as the sole source of truth).
Exploration. Competitive scans and “what would you ask next?” prompts to expand thinking.
Analysis. Help forming hypotheses and checking logic; still validate with data and domain experts.