Ryan Singer: Framing and Hard Conversations

You’ve done a mountain of customer research. There’s a million ways the customer is struggling and customer discovery and shaping have helped you define the possibilities. How do you make sensible decisions about what to do when you have too much information?

Getting technical, design and business people together to figure out what you’re saying yes to before we commit to building it is shaping work. Now framing work begins and that is the point where you should expect really hard conversations. Framing is about the problem and the business value. It’s the work we do to challenge a problem, narrow it down, and to find out if the business has interest and urgency to solve it.

Framing is about understanding the business tradeoffs involved in building new features you could build and making informed decisions about what to prioritise. The customer says they want feature A. What will the customer do without it? How much resource will it require to build? Will the feature help you gain customers? Without it will the feature lose you customers?

Ryan will share some trusted frameworks and tools that can help you to define what you’re going to go invest your precious time and energy into next and help you answer the question, what do you say no to?


Ryan Singer Felt Presence
Ryan Singer

Ryan Singer

Founder, Felt Presence

In 2003, joined the team of three at 37signals that created Basecamp and deeply influenced the early SaaS industry. Over 17 years, he designed features used by millions and invented processes design, develop and ship software. Ryan’s superpower lies in the zone between demand and supply side where he helps people figure out what potential customers are struggling to do, map that to technical expertise, then shape a product concept that teams can implement.

In 2019, Ryan wrote a book about managing software development: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters. He founded Felt Presence in 2022 to help product teams stop running in circles and regain the thrill of building.

More from Ryan.


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