Frameworks for People Who Hate Frameworks
Rules of Thumb That Scale
You keep ending up in the same scene.
A team is “moving fast” but shipping feels random. Decisions take forever. The backlog grows in three directions at once. People keep saying “we just need to execute”… while tripping over the same problems every week.
And you know what usually happens in these situations:
Someone adds process.
A new ceremony. A new template. A new framework with a triangle, a flywheel, and a name that sounds like it was invented in a conference hallway.
For two weeks, it looks like progress and then the framework becomes… work while the team goes back to fighting the same fires, just with nicer vocabulary.
That’s the moment I care about. Frameworks aren’t inherently bad, but most of them are too fragile for real life. They rely on perfect discipline, perfect context, and perfect humans.
Real teams don’t get perfect humans.
They get Tuesdays.
I’m increasingly convinced the teams that win aren’t the ones with the most elaborate operating system. Rather, they’re the ones with a small set of rules of thumb that survive contact with reality.
Simple enough to remember under stress.
Concrete enough to change behavior.
Flexible enough to work across teams, codebases, and org sizes.
Because complexity doesn’t just attack you head on, it creeps up on you by:
slowing decisions
inflating WIP
hiding ownership
And the worst part: it makes smart people feel like the problem is them.
It’s not.
The problem is that when pressure rises, you don’t rise to the level of your ambition. You fall to the level of your defaults.
Which is why, I’ve become a collector of defaults that actually help.
Frameworks for people who hate frameworks.
In the next couple of weeks, I will introduce you to a few of my favourite “frameworks for people who hate frameworks”. This series aims to be simple, practical, and repeatable.
Each entry will give you a rule you can apply immediately, usually in under a week, plus a couple of examples so it’s not just theory.
If you’re tired of frameworks that collapse the moment your calendar fills up, you’re in the right place.
You’ll see some familiar ones, reframed for builders, you’ll see some that I came up with. And I’ll add more as I find them, but only if they pass the test: does it still work when things are messy?
First up: More / Better / New - a growth rule reframed as an engineering execution approach: scale what works, remove the bottleneck, then change the system:
Stay tuned and make sure you subscribe to grab all of the frameworks!
I like frameworks, but still subscribed. That’s a strong hook👍
I think we all hate frameworks, much like we’d hate a straitjacket, but I also believe we need them. I’m actually working on a few, things like checklists, matrices, and stopping rules for algorithmic fairness. I’ll be keeping an eye out for your posts