About 12 years ago, I was working at a startup called Yummly. We'd just launched a mobile app that was ahead of its time. Think personalized food recommendations, a stunning UX of curated recipe images, and some of the most engaging food and beverage content on the 2013 internet. Pinterest was sweating. We were already deep into the food content game, and they were still figuring out how to win over DIY moms in Utah.
Shortly after that launch, our CEO called an all-day strategy session. The goal? Keep generating new product ideas while still delivering the ones we'd already promised. After all, we had a highly anticipated QBR coming up, and Series B fundraising was on the horizon.
Each team was asked to meet ahead of the session and to come prepared with a stack of sticky notes with the following:
Blue stickies = Our current initiatives
Yellow stickies = anything considered KTLO (keep the lights on)
Pink stickies = new ideas
We slapped them all on posters that were hung up throughout the giant conference room. Then our CEO walked to the largest whiteboard and drew a simple x-y axis: effort on the x-axis, impact on the y.
"Define impact," our head of data science demanded. "Value. Flavor. Customer delight. Revenue. You tell me," the CEO shot back, light-heartedly.
Once we all agreed or agreed to disagree on "impact," one by one, we debated each sticky. We were timed by our CFO to stay under two minutes for what became animated but succinct discussions on each of the stickies as they were placed in any of the four quadrants on the whiteboard, one by one. After mapping everything, the CTO walked over to the high-effort, low-impact quadrant, pulled those stickies off, and asked, "Can we ship the stuff that's still up here without doing these?"
Cue groans, nods, a few 'yeah-buts', a few time-boxed debates, but ultimately, clarity. It was the first time in my career I witnessed a prioritization exercise that actually worked. Top-down, but inclusive. Strategic, but grounded. And fast (a full day is shorter than hours of weekly meetings, think about it).
Since then, I've worked in a lot of different product orgs. And while frameworks like WSJF and RICE scoring sound good on paper, they can fall flat in practice, especially when teams lack shared context or trust. Sometimes you need something simple that doesn’t require calculations.
I once interviewed at a big e-comm retailer where they asked me to write Jira stories about a kids' doll dress-up app and expected me to use a story-point poker method to prioritize the list of stories. But how do you do that when you don't know the team, the tech, or even what "impact" means in their world? As a PM, you are actually the one responsible for defining the impact, the business outcomes, the KPIs, and ensuring your dev team has that down before they kick off technical feasibility and story-pointing.
That's why I still go back to the good old effort vs. impact matrix. It works across org levels, with product or business strategy, in PMOs, or even for quick and dirty feature prioritization, and it forces the conversation that matters: What do we actually mean by impact?
Here's what I've learned:
Don't force frameworks. If it doesn't feel natural for your team, it probably isn't helping.
Don't contort your existing SOPs just to make room for the shiny new framework you read about last week.
The best tools are the ones that simplify decision-making, not complicate it.
At Williams-Sonoma, in the middle of trying to launch our first mobile shopping app with Pottery Barn Kids and trying to navigate a growing list of last-minute requests from business stakeholders with concerns like “we can’t launch this if you don’t include this checklist functionality, that header font, this call-to-action,” I remember our CTO casually reminding me: "Just ask yourself, if we don't include this, does the business fall apart? Or is it just a should-have?" That's MoSCoW. Simple. Quietly powerful.
So here's the real question:
What frameworks do you actually use? Which ones are you ready to leave behind?