I Collected 100+ Thinking Frameworks Over a Decade. Then I Built FrameworkList.

The moment I realized I had a problem was in a 1:1 with my manager.

She asked me, casually, "Have you done a pre-mortem on this launch?"

I said, "Yeah, definitely." I had not. I knew what a pre-mortem was — Gary Klein, imagine the project failed, work backwards from the wreckage — but in that moment, sitting across from her, I could not have run one if my career depended on it. I was bluffing about a tool I had literally highlighted in a book two weeks earlier.

The Frameworks-In-The-Wild Problem

Over ten years of working in product and strategy, I had collected frameworks the way some people collect vinyl. SWOT, OKRs, RICE, ICE, Eisenhower Matrix, Cynefin, Jobs To Be Done, Lean Canvas, the Five Whys, Six Thinking Hats, the 10/10/10 Rule, Hanlon's Razor, Chesterton's Fence. I had read Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Pyramid Principle, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, every Shane Parrish post on mental models, half the Farnam Street archive.

And yet — at the moment I needed any of them — I'd freeze.

The problem wasn't that I didn't know the frameworks. The problem was that they lived in fifteen different places:

• Underlines in physical books on a shelf in another city.
• Highlights in Kindle that I had never re-opened.
• A Notion page called "Mental Models" that I last edited in 2021.
• Apple Notes titled "swot??", "rice prioritization (the good one)", "frameworks worth remembering".
• Bookmarks. So many bookmarks.

Search couldn't help me. To search, I needed to remember the framework's name. And by the time I remembered its name, the meeting was over.

You Don't Need More Frameworks. You Need The Right Shape.

The realization came slowly. A framework isn't really knowledge — it's a shape. It's a container for thinking that says, "if you pour this kind of problem into this kind of structure, something useful happens."

SWOT is a 2×2 shape for situational awareness. RICE is a four-variable shape for prioritizing roadmap items. The Eisenhower Matrix is a 2×2 shape for triaging your inbox. Pre-Mortem is a time-travel shape for stress-testing a plan before you commit.

Different problems need different shapes. And shapes are easy to forget the steps of, even when you remember the name.

I didn't need to read another book. I needed a lookup table. Something I could glance at in the thirty seconds before a meeting and walk in with the right shape already loaded.

So I Built FrameworkList

I started by writing down every framework I had ever found useful. Then I went back through my bookshelf, my Kindle highlights, my Notion, my Apple Notes. I added every framework I had ever tried to remember and failed. I hit 100 before I stopped.

Then I gave each one the same three sections, ruthlessly:

• What it is — one paragraph, no fluff, no etymology.
• When to use it — the specific shape of problem this framework is for.
• A worked example — a real one, not a sanitized one.

That's the structure of every page on FrameworkList. You can browse all 100+ by category — strategy, prioritization, decision-making, problem-solving, communication, behavioral — or jump straight to a specific one when you remember its name but not its steps.

What Surprised Me Building It

Three things, in order:

Most frameworks are simpler than the book makes them sound. A surprising number of 100-page business books can be compressed into three lines and a diagram. The padding exists because authors need to fill a book. The framework itself is usually one page.

The "when to use" line matters more than the framework itself. Knowing SWOT exists is useless. Knowing "use SWOT when you have a strategic decision to make and you're emotional about it" is actually useful. I spent more time on the when-to-use lines than on anything else.

A lot of the famous ones are wrong-shaped for modern work. Some classic frameworks are basically twentieth-century PowerPoint relics — useful as vocabulary, less useful as actual instruments. I kept them in the library but made the limitations explicit. Honesty about the tools is part of the tools.

Who I Built This For

Mostly past-me. The version of me who said "yeah, definitely" when asked about a pre-mortem and then spent the rest of the week quietly googling.

But also:

• The PM who's about to walk into a roadmap review and wants to actually prioritize, not just argue.
• The founder who has been told to "do a SWOT" and wants the real shape, not a stock-photo template.
• The operator who reads a lot, retains nothing, and is tired of it.
• The student who's about to write a strategy essay and needs a vocabulary that isn't just "Porter's Five Forces" three times.

If you've ever bluffed your way through "have you considered X framework?" — this is for you. It's for me too.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy The Entropy of Strategy — on why product roadmaps drift toward chaos without external structure — or The SWOTPal Story on building an AI tool for one specific framework in depth.