3 Decision-Making Frameworks in Every Successful Founder’s Toolkit

 

Enhao Li & Katie Doherty

5 min read

Many of us, who are able, are settling into the reality of working from home for the foreseeable future. For founders, that may mean transitioning from an office, a shared workspace, a favorite cafe, or another environment that we’ve found conducive to our individual needs around productivity. Working from home and in isolation can bring a number of barriers to maintaining that same level of focus and efficiency. (If you’re in San Francisco like us, it probably means working at home with your five to ten roommates, which presents a whole array of different challenges and opportunities). 

Thus, we thought it a good time to revisit a few frameworks that we teach in our Startup Program (link), and that we founders can use to identify priorities, create structure, and set ourselves up for productivity in any work environment. 

These frameworks are valuable decision-making tools whether you’re exploring a new business idea or deep in product development and working with customers. We’ll start by using the Learning-Oriented Framework to establish long-term goals on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Then we’ll use the Project-Oriented Framework to flesh out our short-term (weekly) projects. Finally, we’ll use the Task-Oriented Framework to break down our weekly deliverables into daily tasks. 

1. Learning-Oriented Framework (Timeframe: Quarterly/Semi-Annual)

As an early-stage startup, it's important to move quickly and to do so we have to learn continuously. We have to ask ourselves over-and-over again, what do I need to learn to better understand if my business can be successful? The founders that do this most effectively have a system in place for setting learning goals, experimenting to validate or invalidate their hypothesis, and evaluating results to determine the next steps.  

We recommend orienting your learning goals around your “riskiest assumptions.” First, what do we mean by “assumptions?” Your idea and vision are based on a series of educated guesses or beliefs you hold to be true about the viability of your business. The assumptions must be true in order for your business opportunity to exist, or if you find that they aren’t true you have to shift your strategy. “Riskiest assumptions,” are those you 1) know the least about and 2) that are the most important for your business success. 

It can take significant time and effort to test risky assumptions, thus we recommend orienting your long-term goals - be it three months or six months - around them. Therefore, choose one or two risky assumptions to test over the next three to six months. Doing so will enable you to more easily prioritize your projects and tasks. 

Note: While even three or six months might not be enough to validate your assumptions, it could take you weeks or even days to invalidate them. If you find yourself invalidating risky assumptions that are necessary for the success of your idea, pause and re-evaluate.

We recommend using sticky notes or a whiteboarding tool Mural (link) to do the following:

Step 1) Start by framing your risky assumptions as questions. Revise the questions below for your particular business and add other risky assumptions in the form of questions that you think are relevant.

  • Does the customer actually care about this problem? Is it really painful for the customer? Or if not painful, is it at least a frequent need? Are they affected enough by the problem that they're actually looking for a solution?

  • Is their current solution really not working?

  • Does the customer have the money or want to pay to solve this problem?

  • Will you be able to find these customers?

  • Can I solve the customer's problem?

  • Are there enough people interested in my solution?

  • Can I scale my solution?

  • Is my business financially sustainable?

  • Can I grow it into something bigger?

  • Is there any legal regulation or intellectual property that could hinder my business?

Step 2) With a long list of assumptions, we need to determine which ones are the riskiest and therefore at the top of your list of learning goals. The risky assumption analysis will be looking at each assumption based on two criteria:

  • Impact: its impact on our business if we are wrong

  • Uncertainty: how likely are we to be wrong about this assumption

 
Matrix 1.png

When we graph this on a 2x2 matrix, we see that the most important group we need to focus on are the high impact assumptions we know very little about. You might still need to spend time on high impact assumptions you are informed about already, but your priority should be first around better understanding the high impact unknowns. Any low impact assumptions should be ignored for now.

2. Project-Oriented Framework (Timeframe: Weekly/Bi-Weekly)

In order to achieve our long-term learning goals, we need to break them down into smaller, concrete projects. In our Startup Program (link) we advise founders to break them into one-week “Sprints.” The ever-trendy term “Sprints” comes from Agile product development methodology (link) and refers to a set period of time for completing a project and preparing it for review. In using the Sprint structure, we clearly establish our focus for that week. It can help us to avoid the very typical founder pitfall of feeling like you’re constantly putting out fires rather than building your business. This is a frequent trap for founders; So many things feel urgent, and those are the things you end up working on. The issue lies in the fact that what is urgent is rarely important, while what is important is rarely urgent.

When going through your list of experiments, features, and tasks to try to determine your upcoming sprints schedule, we suggest using the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.

It evaluates projects on 2 dimensions:

  • Urgency: How quickly does it need to get done?

  • Important: What impact does it have on our goals?

 
matrix 2.png

Step 1) On sticky notes, write down all of the projects you need to complete in order to achieve your learning goals. Your learning goals are your riskiest assumptions from above. Or in other words, what experiments do you need to do to help you understand whether or not your riskiest assumptions are true? You will also have projects here that might not be directly related to your learning goals and risky assumptions.

Step 2) Place those sticky notes on the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. Depending on which quartile those projects fall in, you’ll use the matrix to determine your Sprint schedule.

  1. Important and Urgent - these should be queued up for your upcoming Sprints

  2. Important and Not Urgent - schedule a time to do this quarter, perhaps next month or when it becomes more urgent

  3. Not Important but Urgent - delegate this, especially once you have a team. Whether it's outsourcing it, getting an intern on it, you should avoid doing these yourself if you can

  4. Not Important or Urgent - another easy one, remove these, purge these from your project list

3. Task-Oriented Framework  (Timeframe: Daily)

With your learning goals and Sprint schedule in place, we'll further break these down into individual tasks to be done on a daily basis. When it comes down to managing your time day-to-day, let’s consider 1) the impact of the task on our Sprint deliverables 2) how much effort it requires to complete.

Dimensions:

  • Impact: its impact on our Sprint deliverables

  • Complexity: the complexity of the task

 
Frame 5.png

At Female Founder School we empower women to start successful companies.

 
Matrix 3.png
 

Looking at the outcomes:

  1. Focus your time and efforts on tasks that are high impact but easy or medium complexity, make sure to start with these items

  2. Avoid/remove tasks that are low impact and medium or hard to do

  3. If something is both complex and important, it should probably be categorized as a project or experiment and be broken down into smaller tasks

  4. For medium impact but easy or medium complexity, you can do these if you have time

One tool that we like for managing our daily to-do’s is Trello (link).

Onward

We hope that these frameworks provide valuable structure for driving your productivity in a shifting workplace paradigm. 

For anyone looking to start a company or who wants mentorship during their company building process, we’d love to chat with you about applying to our online Startup Program (link), starting in April 2020. In three months - using our 10 Step Framework - we help you go from testing your idea to launching your first product and bringing on your initial customers. Validate your idea, build founder skills, join the community (link)!

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AdviceKatie DohertyWomen in Tech, Female Founders, Starting a company, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship