Laundry list of product frameworks, rules-of-thumb and mental models

Frameworks and mental models can help us “product manage” better. This post shares some of the most well known about product frameworks. Of course, they’re all situation-dependent — we should know when to use which one. Innovation is messy. Be experimental and share mental models with others. But always involve your stakeholders and shape the framework or process around them. Don’t prescribe a mental model but rather make it work for you and your team!

Before we dive in…

For any given problem, there may be a good solution, a so-so solution and a terrible solution. Frameworks are useful but when applied correctly. We must be careful and make sure we don’t apply a one-size-fits-all approach to frameworks and mental models. Please bear this in mind when you use frameworks — your mileage may vary, depending on you, your team and company.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail

— Abraham Maslow

Laundry list

Strategy

ICED: Framework to organise thoughts for products that are infrequently used (e.g. once-a-year)

• Degree of infrequency: How well can they recall our product? What approaches can we take to increase reach?
• Degree of control over UX: What can we control and change to increase our ability to convert customers?
• Degree of engagement: How complex is the transaction? Is it high touch or low touch? Are we able to retain customers?
• Degree of distinctiveness (of product): How differentiated is the product/experience from alternatives?

Product-Market Fit (PMF) framework [Rahul Vohra, Superhuman]: add science to your search for the elusive PMF

• Focus on who’d be very disappointed if product disappeared
• Keep targeting your product towards those who say very disappointed
• Reach at least 40% who say very disappointed to reach PMF

Three Horizons (McKinsey): Manage current performance while maximising future opportunities — prepare for your future while addressing the now

• Horizon one: Operators extend current core business
• The product improvements that impact today’s customers
• Horizon two: Business builders develop new opportunities (need exploration and investment)
• The product roadmap that impacts customers 6+ months from now
• Horizon three: Visionaries create viable, disruptive options
• The moonshots that impact prospective customers in the long, long term future

Multiple Strategic Tracks (MuST): Small and medium sized projects to test multiple, big ideas in parallel

• Activities can be bottom-up (e.g. Apple iPhone, Google Gmail)

Product Strategy Canvas: a way of articulating strategy that states vision, challenge, target condition, current state

• Vision: where product and business is heading long term
• Challenge: business goal to focus on to reach product vision, the thing to solve first
• Target condition: Challenge broken into smaller, actionable, measurable problems
• Current state: current situation, to measure target condition against

AARRR (pirate): Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue — the pirate framework outlines stages of your funnel. If any one stage is leaky, your product growth will suffer

Hooked model: Trigger → Action → Variable Reward → Investment. The model from Nir Eyal’s book “Hooked”. It models some of the biggest social media platforms (e.g. Facebook) and outlines how habit-forming products are born

4 D’s: Do’s, Defer, Delegate, Dump. Framework to work out what to focus on

LNO: Leverage, Neutral, Overhead. Framework to leverage your time and efforts

• Do leverage takes very well
• Do neutral tasks ok
• Do overhead tasks badly, just get them done

Work backwards (e.g. Amazon): Start from the end and write an internal press release before you even start product development

Theme-Epic-Story (Agile): Start with themes, then deliver Epics and Stories

Allocation [Shreyas] — break down your roadmap into types of efforts. The “DIET-SET” framework:

1. Differentiators
2. Incrementals
3. Embarrassments (or “Broken Windows”)
4. Table stakes — minimum to be viable in the market
5. Speculative Bets
6. Enterprise (or large) Customer Requests
7. Tech Foundation — Reliability, Security, Eng Productivity, Infra, etc.

4 P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place

• Product: What is the product, what makes it unique?
• Price: consider value, margin, price elasticity, etc.
• Promotion: advertising, PR, social media marketing, SEO, etc.
• Place: Find channels to distribute

Popularity, urgency, frequency [Kevin Hale]: Evaluate startup ideas

• Popularity: reach of the product
• Urgency: How badly customers need it
• Frequency: Do they need it often enough (the “Toothbrush Test”)

Mental models

First principles thinking: What do I know? Start from there

Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is often the right one

Build the right thing, rather than building the thing right

Laws of UX

• Aesthetic-Usability Effect: Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable
• Doherty Threshold: Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other
• Fitts’s Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target
• Goal-Gradient Effect: The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal
• Hick’s Law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices
• Jakob’s Law: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know
• Law of Common Region: Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary
• Law of Proximity: Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together
• Law of Prägnanz: People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us
• Law of Similarity: The human eye tends to perceive similar elements in a design as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated
• Law of Uniform Connectedness: Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection
• Miller’s Law: The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory
• Occam’s Razor: Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected
• Pareto Principle: for many events, roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes
• Parkinson’s Law: For any task with a deadline, you will inflate the task to fill all of the available time [Reduce actual duration of task compared to expected]
• Peak-End Rule: People judge experiences largely on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience [Optimise for delight/end of journey]
• Postel’s Law: Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send [Forms and user input]
• Serial Position Effect: Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series [Placement of key CTAs/info]
• Von Restorff Effect (a.k.a. Isolation Effect): predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered [Placement of key CTAs/info]
• Zeigarnik Effect: People remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks [User motivation]

6 emotions that make customers buy [Geoffrey James], “FPAGES”

• Fear (of missing out, losing, wasting)
• Pride (that adds to self-worth, the want to look smart)
• Altruism (the want to help or have the appearance thereof)
• Greed (for more time, money, resources, knowledge)
• Envy (of what others have or want to prevent others having it)
• Shame (for looking stupid)

Comms

The 4 key comms activities: Every organisation must, must, must have three key comms activities — from The Startup CEO by Matt Blumberg

• All-hands: Company-wide, weekly
• Stand-ups: Essential team comms to unblock issues, daily. Should be quick. Don’t make people stand longer than they have to!
• One-on-one’s: Safe space to surface issues (work and non-work) and vent
• Ad-hoc: Water cooler and hallway chats

North Star metric (Amplitude): drive alignment, communicate impact, increase accountability in the team

Product Alignment Document (PAD) [Miro]: structure discovery, design and post-launch stages of product lifecycle. Similar to Product Requirements Documents

Opportunity/Problem Framing: why it’s important

Solution Framing: how team will address problem, launch it

Post-launch Recap: share learnings and updates on key metrics

Weekly Product Alignment Meetings to decide next steps:

• Continue
• Approved but tweak
• Direction ok but revisit
• Not approved
• Needs more work

4 Key Product Docs [Pandora]: the must-have product documentation

Executive Summary: Abstract of what PM team is working on

• Get up-to speed quickly

Wiki Pages: High-level focus areas/pillars, including engineering statuses, milestones

• Progress map for each pillar
• Timelines for pillars

Product Requirements Document (PRD): E2E product plan with specs, research, etc.

Launch Plan Document: Operational planning docs to align efforts between teams (PM, marketing, sales, dev)

Pre-mortem: identify and simulate issues before release, so that you can identify your biggest risks. See Shreyas’s Tiger, Paper Tiger and Elephant

Post-mortem: document the timeline of the incident and events, who was involved, the impact on customers, a root cause analysis and next steps, so that your team and organisation can embrace failure and learn for next time

• Use 5 Why’s to arrive at root cause

Dependency Mapping: Understand what could impact a project’s success. Again, a risk management exercise

• Identify Systems Impacted (owner, description of impact)
• Find potential risks (risk, level of impact, mitigation plan, owner)
• Manage risks (stakeholder, review cadence, actions)

Retrospectives: Safe place to discuss what worked and what didn’t (e.g. Mad-Sad-Glad, Up-Down are my favourites)

Stand-ups: Daily communication of recent activity and next activities — one of the 4 key comms activities (see above)

Product Vision Board: Like the business model canvas, communicate vision and assumptions on:

• Target group
• Customer needs
• How the product solves the problem
• Value it brings to business (new revenue stream, etc.)

DACI: Driver, approver, contributor, informed — the planning that every initiative needs

• Create collab document (e.g. Trello board)
• Decide on Driver for decision — who facilitates decision making
• Approver approves decision
• Contributors who have knowledge to inform decision-making
• Informed include anyone who may be affected by decision/outcome
• Planning: due date, background, supporting data, options considered for decision

Project kickoff: objectives, timing, scope, decision-making to make sure the most important details are fleshed out

OKRs: Communicate and agree on objectives and key results regularly, so that the organisation is aligned from the top-down

Health monitor: get team to openly discuss and rate (focus on observations):

• Full-time owner
• Team balance
• Shared understanding
• Value and metrics
• Proof of concept
• One-pager
• Managed dependencies
• Velocity

Feature kick-off: Increase confidence in a feature’s value

• Feature overview, feedback, user journey overview, feedback

Weekly newsletter: for everyone to read, write once, communicate with everyone

RFC: Request For Comment proposal documents to gather feedback from the team

People

Shreyas’ PM delegation framework [Tweet]: impact vs confidence matrix. Be comfortable with delegating decisions on lower impact, higher confidence problems. Adjust to seniority of course!

Avoid implementation details [*]: Focus on Acceptance Criteria — the customer’s needs

• Telling engineers how to build something takes all the joy out of their work
• Don’t tell your commissioned painter what to paint

Create clarity [*]: Create clarity so that it’s obvious what the best option is

• Put strategy first [*]

Build a good relationship with the lead engineer

• A sour relationship is a non-starter, silos will emerge and differences will be hard to resolve
• Always focus on the customer, your common goal

Prioritisation

Riskiest Assumption Test: Front-load biggest risks. You’ll save yourself a lot of time later

Customer Problem Rank Stack [Shreyas]: Ask customer to rank problem against all the other problems they have. Otherwise all problems will be equally important. Useful for B2B

6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years roadmap: popularised by Intercom to separate the short term initiatives from the long term

RICE: the simple formula to prioritise intiatives (Reach * Impact [0.25–3] * Confidence [0–100%]) / Effort [0.5–3]

Blogpost-driven-development [Estimote]: Write a blogpost of the next product update, focus on problems being solved

Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, Experience (HIPE) [Pinterest]: Evaluate growth opportunities with this heuristic

• Hypothesis that includes size of opportunity. Often increases intent or reduces friction
• Investment is about how much effort opportunity needs (building + maintenance)
• Precedent looks at team’s past experiments or industry’s examples
• Experience — does this result in good UX? Consider long-term retention and metrics for quality of UX

Impact-effort matrix (similar to Eisenhower matrix) that breaks down initiatives into four buckets

Eisenhower matrix: urgency vs importance matrix that breaks down initiatives into four buckets

Impact mapping: draw relationships between goals and features. Often we forget to connect the dots between the customer and the feature

• Goal → Who → Impact → Deliverable
• Why → Who → How → What

OKRs: Align roadmap items with OKRs and prioritise

Kano model: increase the likelihood of delighting customers

• Must-haves vs delighters vs performance

Weighted scoring: weight efforts by benefits and costs to arrive at a score

• E.g. customer value, revenue (benefits); dev effort, risk
• Similar to RICE

Story mapping: Map stories in customer journey map and assess priority

• Shows how and when an initiative impacts the customer

MoSCoW: Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves, Would-haves. A breakdown to help us prioritise the roadmap

Opportunity scoring: level up essential but disappointing (table stake) features

• Ask customers to identify features that are essential but disappointing
• Prioritise those that are important but disappointing

Affinity grouping: write out opportunities and group by themes

Buy-a-feature: Great to use to involve others. Give your team a limited amount of “points” to spend on features in a roadmap. Note, the outcome should only an input, not the input. You’re still driving it

Planning Poker: Each person in sprint planning gets Fibonacci-numbered cards and estimates effort with those cards. Estimates then factor into prioritisation

Agile development

Scrum: sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, sprint retrospective. The popular Agile approach to managing software projects

• Deliver in sprints
• Measure velocity
• No changes during sprint
• Roles: PO, scrum master, development team

Kanban: visualise work, limit work-in-progress, maximise flow. Experienced and disciplined teams can enjoy the benefit of this project management style

• Deliver continuously
• Measure **lead time, cycle time, WIP
• Change at any time
• No roles per se
• Minimise how long it takes to deliver unit of value

Productivity

Get S%#& Done Day: Schedule deep work on a regular basis

Pomodoro technique: 25-minute units of work and 5 minute breaks. This makes work focused

Design

MVP (Spotify): Start with a skateboard, then a bicycle, then a car… build-measure-learn

11-star experience (Airbnb): Start at a 5-star experience and find what you need to become 11-star

Design thinking / Design Sprint: Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. Design an experience end-to-end

Game Thinking: validate ideas through prototypes by partnering with “super fans”. Plan product lifecycle by identifying the UX path from novice to “mastery”

• Identify super fans (desperate for solution, will eagerly give feedback)
• Plan path to “mastery”. Identify how super fans will go from novice to expert using product
• Test core experience and create learning loop. Loop keeps users interested and returning to product

Customer journey map: Get insights of the user’s experience of product/service. Includes:

• Touchpoints
• Interactions
• Ideas/feelings

CIRCLES: Identify concrete customer problems and come up with recommendations

1. Comprehend situation
2. Identify customer
3. Report needs (user stories)
4. Cut through prioritization
5. List solutions
6. Evaluate trade-offs
7. Summarise recommendation

Kennedy Principle: Ask what you can do for user, not what they can do for you

• Example: Some sites ask you for a zip code in a form and auto-fills the city and state address information, so the user doesn’t have to

How might we: ideating and brainstorming with “how might we” questions, so that you open up the discussion. Without “how might we”, you might have someone in the room always shoot down suggestions with “but”

Mindmapping: Start with a question in the middle of a large whiteboard or paper, branch out thoughts, branch out ideas

HEART (Google): Measure quality of UX. UX design framework to define goals, signals and metrics for:

• Happiness
• Engagement
• Adoption
• Retention
• Task success

Wireframing: Low fidelity prototyping before moving onto high fidelity

• Example: Use Balsamiq to produce low-fidelity prototypes you can show key stakeholders

CRAP rule: Robin William’s simple design principles for visual design. Even non-designers can use this rule

• Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity
• Example: Make sure the headings on a page are aligned vertically (alignment), elements that belong together are close together (proximity)

Design system: A common visual language and set of components (e.g. Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc.)

• Example: Leverage Tailwind CSS to save your shorthanded product team design work and develop the front-end UI at speed

Wizard of Oz: Prototyping method where you offer a software service that a human operates behind the scenes

• Example: When you’re developing a chatbot and the back-end is still in works, consider if you can have real people answer chatbot questions to gain learnings while the back-end is being developed

Discovery

JTBD: Helping the customer make progress. Read more about it here.

Product Kata [Melissa Perri]: systematic way of building product

• Set goal and target condition
• Identify current condition
• Detect obstacles
• Exploratory step to take to remove obstacle
• Expected results
• Write down learnings

Assumption Mapping: identify riskiest assumptions about desirability, feasibility, and viability of new product/service

• 2x2 matrix: Known vs Unknown and Important vs Unimportant
• See Riskiest Assumption Testing

Dual-Track Agile: Validate ideas in fastest, cheapest way

Two tracks: Discovery and Delivery

• Product backlog items are always validated by prototypes, ready for delivery

Experience mapping: Clarify problem being solved, who you’re solving for, define success

• Adaptation of the lean canvas (hypothesis, problem, customer personas, stakeholders, team, value, ideas, MVE, E2E demo, metrics)

Double Diamond: Map divergent and convergent stages of a design process:

• Understand
• Define
• Explore
• Create

But how do I use framework X?

A laundry list is only useful as a reference. How do you actually put them into practice? My suggestion would be to:

• Identify the problem that your team or company is facing or will face in the near future. Make sure the framework fits the problem
• Float the framework with your colleagues and team mates, see how they think. Frame the framework to your needs and address the “why”. Mention other companies that use the technique (this often raises brows). Nobody cares for a framework unless it makes life easier
• Run a brief “primer” talk with the team to introduce it to them
• Practise what you preach — really incorporate the framework into your work

Useful links

📖 Atlassian’s product-frameworks.com

Thank you

That’s it for today. There are many more product frameworks and mental models of course — see Atlassian’s product-frameworks.com — but I hope you’ll find the ones above useful for product.

Thanks for reading this blogpost. If you liked it and want to be updated the next time I post something, you can follow me on Twitter.

If you want to chat with me about product, please do reach out — I’m always keen to talk to product people!