Why RICE and HEART Won't Save You

Frameworks are a security blanket.

Structure feels like progress, so PMs reach for RICE, HEART and whatever acronym Product Hunt surfaces next. But decisions aren't made by frameworks.

They don't show judgment.

Strong PMs do not default to templates. The questions they ask are harder to dodge. The calls they reach for RICE eventually but by the time they do the uncomfortable thinking is already done.

Frameworks serve as a sanity check, not a brain. Nobody lets a spell-checker write the email. But that's more or less what's happening.

Anyway, you do not gain perception by templating. I'm not even sure "perception" is the right word here, but you know what I mean.

Product sense tends to arrive without announcement, from what I can tell. A launch that went badly. A bet that needed explaining to someone who wasn't happy. Something where the doc was useless because nobody expected to be standing in it.

Nobody I've watched build real product sense was doing it on purpose, as far as I could tell. There was usually a launch that went sideways, or a roadmap that got pulled apart in review and nothing to reach for. The thinking sharpened because it had to.

The template was never an option.