# Why Most PMs Don't Need More Frameworks

> RICE, ICE, MoSCoW, Kano, Jobs-to-be-Done: the PM internet runs on collecting frameworks. The senior PMs I respect use almost none of them, and what they reach for instead is duller and works.

Author: Abdul Hannan Shaikh, senior technical PM at APIMatic.
Published: 8 September 2024  
Topic: PM craft  
Reading time: 4 min read  
Canonical: https://soch.ahshaikh.com/blog/why-most-pms-dont-need-more-frameworks/

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Spend a week on PM Twitter and you'll see a dozen new "frameworks", usually a 2x2 with crisp names and an acronym. Most of them are fine. None of them is what makes a senior PM senior. The senior PMs I respect use almost no frameworks day-to-day, and what they reach for instead is duller.

This isn't anti-framework. Frameworks are great when you're learning the shape of a problem space, because they hand you the vocabulary. The trap is treating framework collection as professional development past that point.

## What frameworks actually do

Nearly every PM framework is doing one of a small number of jobs. Some force you to compare options on the same dimensions, which is RICE and ICE. Some force you to consider a perspective you'd otherwise skip, which is Kano and Jobs-to-be-Done. MoSCoW and RACI exist to stop a trade-off staying implicit. That's the whole utility.

Once you've internalized "compare on the same dimensions" and "consider what users actually want vs. what they ask for" and "make trade-offs explicit," you don't need the framework any more. You'll do it instinctively. Pulling up RICE in a meeting after five years of PM practice is an English major reaching for a thesaurus to find the word "important."

## The habits that matter

Here's what I see instead, in the PMs who don't need them.

**They write a one-page decision memo before any non-trivial call.** Not a PRD. A memo. Two paragraphs of context, three of options with trade-offs, one with the recommendation. The act of writing forces the reasoning. The memo is the artifact you're left with, and it's the outline most PMs think they need a framework for.

**They have a default question they ask in every spec review.** Mine is "what would have to be true for us to ship this and regret it?" Other PMs use "who is the user who would hate this, and why?" or "what's the smallest version that would still teach us something?" Pick one and use it relentlessly. It does more work than any framework.

**They run their own postmortems on roadmap-level decisions, not just incidents.** Three months after a big call, look back honestly. What did you predict, and what actually happened? Most PMs only postmortem outages. The returns that compound come from postmortem-ing the strategic calls, and almost nobody schedules those.

## When frameworks are the right tool

There are places I'd still reach for one. New PMs use them to learn the moves, which is exactly what they're for. In a cross-functional alignment meeting they work as shared vocabulary, so an engineering lead and a sales lead can argue about the same trade-off. And some domains are simply too big for instinct: pricing, compensation, technical-debt tradeoffs. Walk those through with a structure.

## The tell

Outside those contexts, reaching for a framework is usually a signal that you're trying to look rigorous instead of being rigorous. Nobody says that out loud. The instinctive judgment of an experienced PM, written down clearly, is worth more than a RICE score that lets you pretend a vibes-call was data-driven.

## The honest test

Take the framework away from the PM. Does the quality of the decision change? If it does, they're leaning on it because they don't have the instinct yet. That's fine. Early in a career that is exactly what frameworks are for. If it doesn't, the framework is decoration.

The professional development that compounds isn't "I learned a new framework." It's "I caught myself making a worse decision and I know why." After that you pick a framework up when you actually need one, which, for most PMs past mid-level, is less often than the PM internet would suggest.