I’ve written before about how data, frameworks, and intuition can help make product decisions. In this post I will drill down into how frameworks are one of the most powerful tools in your product management toolkit.
According to Wikipedia, “A conceptual framework is an analytical tool with several variations and contexts. It can be applied in different categories of work where an overall picture is needed. It is used to make conceptual distinctions and organize ideas. Strong conceptual frameworks capture something real and do this in a way that is easy to remember and apply.”
Frameworks are useful in two distinct ways. First, they can help you cut through ambiguity and bring clarity to a problem. Second, they can help you communicate a complex product problem in a simple and digestible way.
Most interesting product problems have high degrees of ambiguity and complexity. There might be many degrees of design freedom and the potential solution space can quickly become overwhelming. If you imagine the design problem as a multidimensional space, you need to carve up that space in a way that helps you make sense of the problem. How do you do this?
One approach is to think through the major levers on which the design problem hinges. It is unlikely that every dimension in your design space is equally important. If you can identify the major levers, then the next step is to bifurcate the space along those levers, kind of like running the binary space partition algorithm on your design space. In two-dimensions, this often looks like the classical 2×2 grid.
Another approach is to think through the criteria that your product solution must meet. Keep the number of criteria to a “minimum spanning set”. The minimum spanning set is the smallest number of criteria that your solution must meet to be viable. If you can remove a criteria and your solution does not change, then you are not at the minimum spanning set. If you add a criteria and your solution swings to a wildly different answer, you are probably missing a major dimension.
A third approach is to use negative space. I’ve written before about explicitly laying out the assumptions, goals, and non-goals in your business writing. Negative space is similar to the non-goals. Think about problems that you are explicitly not attempting to solve. What is out-of-scope? By carving out the out-of-scope clutter, the in-scope solution might stand out more clearly.
A fourth approach is to hold some dimensions constant. This is particularly important when your problem space is multi-dimensional. Humans cannot visualize 4D or higher dimensions. One way to make such problems tractable is to hold one or more dimensions constant and analyze the problem space in that lower dimensional plane. For example, a three dimensional problem space could be analyzed by starting with a planar “slice”. The slice is a simpler problem to tackle. Once you’ve cracked the problem on the planar slice, it will be easier to generalize the solution to the original 3D space.
I consider the four suggestions above as examples of “meta-frameworks”. They are tools to help you develop your own frameworks, specific to the domain in which you work. You will notice that I have not provided frameworks that I use in my own work here. This is because canned frameworks obtained from someone else are usually not very effective. Every domain is unique and while some frameworks can and should apply across domains, the skill to develop is “framework-driven thinking”. I’d encourage you to develop your own frameworks to analyze the product problems you are tackling. Practice structured communication of complex problems using on-the-fly frameworks. As you build this skill, you will start to naturally think and communicate in more structured, logical, and effective ways.