One framework to rule them all

At the beginning of my career, I soaked in frameworks and tools. I read Blue Ocean Strategy and was eager to make a competitive play as cool as Southwest Airlines. In my first job, people were obsessed with Amazon’s “internal press release.”

But the more I worked, the less I saw any of this used. It even became an anti-criterion — people who relied too much on specific frameworks or tools were viewed as rigid and uncreative.

After years at startups (and the last 3 years as employee #3), I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really only one framework you need to drive most early stage product decisions.

What are we trying to do, and why?
Is it really important?
Have we laid out and evaluated the options?
Have we made a clear decision?

Most startups struggle to make decisions, move on, and execute, which is critical when your primary advantage is speed. These four questions help root out some of the most common issues.

What are we trying to do, and why?

All good product management starts with articulating the problem, the challenge, the opportunity. And our diagnosis of why it exists. This helps us get away from “should we add an AI chatbot?” to the real underlying conversation.

Is it really important?

Startups live briefly and have to stay focused on the existential questions. If this isn’t our first, second, or third most important problem in building a real business, then it isn’t important.

Is it important right now? Timing is critical for early-stage companies. People who migrate to startups from a larger company background are often worried about scalability — a problem most startups never have the opportunity to address. Things that are “12–18 months away” are generally worth an intellectual consideration… but not much more than that.

Have we laid out and evaluated the options?

It’s easy to jump to the first solution we think of when moving fast. Have we actually explored the whole set of solutions? Have we slowed down just enough to consult with cross-functional people who might have a different point of view on what the solution set could be?

What dimensions of these solutions are important? Which dimensions are more important than the others (e.g. are we willing to absorb higher costs to improve our time to market)? Have we scored the potential solutions or validated that some should not be included? Where we need data to evaluate, has it been collected? Where we need conviction to proceed (e.g. on a subjective evaluation of potential impact), have we discussed?

Have we made a clear decision?

Is it clear to everyone in the room what path we chose? Is it documented and disseminated, with a shared sense of urgency?

I love startups partially because there are so many interesting decisions to make. What should we build, how should we build it, how should we go to market, what kinds of roles should we hire, in what order, what kind of profiles should we look for, how do we confront this challenge, how do we capitalize on this momentum? To name a few.

Being able to make decisions quickly and confidently is a superpower for your early team. Laying out your rationale helps drive real alignment. You can create a team aligned not only on what to do, but what we believe, and how we move from belief to creation.