Frameworks & Mental Models

Business has its own scaffolding language — frameworks that get cited in meetings, taught in MBA programs, and printed on consulting deliverables. Most are 30-70 years old. Most are simpler than the deck makes them look. A few are genuinely load-bearing thinking tools; many are sorting boxes that help structure a conversation but don't generate any insight on their own. Knowing which is which separates the operator who uses frameworks well from the one who hides behind them.

This guide gives you the working vocabulary on the six frameworks you'll hear most often: SWOT, Porter's Five Forces, the BCG matrix and Ansoff matrix, the 4Ps of marketing, OKRs, and the alphabet of decision-rights frameworks (DACI, RAPID, MoSCoW). By the end, you should be able to recognize each one when it's invoked, know roughly what it does well, and spot when it's being used to fill space instead of think.

It is not a guide to mastering management consulting. It is a guide to following business conversations that lean on these frameworks — which, in cross-functional work, is most of them.

We'll move in six steps. SWOT (the most-used framework and the most-abused). Porter's Five Forces (the structural-competition lens). BCG + Ansoff (portfolio and growth-direction frameworks). 4Ps (the marketing-mix scaffold). OKRs (goal-setting). And the decision-rights alphabet — DACI, RAPID, MoSCoW — for the question of who decides what.

§1 SWOT — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats Foundational

SWOT is the most-deployed strategy framework in the world and the most-criticized by people who deploy it. It's a 2×2: internal vs external on one axis, helpful vs harmful on the other. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal; Opportunities and Threats are external. The exercise is to list items in each quadrant.

It's old (the 1960s) and simple (anyone can fill in a 2×2 with no training). Those qualities make it both useful and dangerous. Useful, because as a quick discussion scaffold it forces a team to actually name what's working, what's broken, what's coming, and what's threatening — instead of jumping to action. Dangerous, because filling in the 2×2 feels like analysis when it's actually just a list, and the list often becomes the deliverable instead of the input to a decision.

The honest read on when SWOT lands: as a 30-minute warm-up to align a cross-functional team on a shared situation read, especially when the team is new together and people are working from different assumptions. Each person fills in the 2×2 individually, then the team compares — the divergence is the actual insight, not the consensus list. Items that everyone listed go fast; items that one person flagged and others missed are where the conversation should slow down.

When SWOT doesn't land: as a "strategy" deliverable on its own. A finished SWOT 2×2 doesn't tell you what to do — it just inventories the situation. The actual strategic question is "given this SWOT, what bets do we make?" — and that question requires judgment, prioritization, and trade-off-making that the SWOT framework explicitly doesn't help with. Consulting decks that present a SWOT and stop are doing the easy half of the work.

A common improvement: cross the quadrants to generate action ideas. A Strength × Opportunity match suggests where to invest aggressively. A Weakness × Threat match suggests where to defend. A Strength × Threat suggests where to leverage strengths defensively. A Weakness × Opportunity suggests where capability-building unlocks growth. This crossing exercise (sometimes called TOWS analysis) actually generates ideas; vanilla SWOT just lists facts.

The signal in a meeting: if someone presents a SWOT and stops there, they did the warm-up but not the strategy. If they present a SWOT followed by ranked bets and rejected alternatives, the SWOT was real input to the work. The framework's value depends entirely on what you do AFTER you fill it in.

A diagram showing a worked SWOT for a real-shape company plus the TOWS cross-matrix showing how strengths × opportunities, etc., generate concrete moves, makes the difference between framework-as-list and framework-as-input visible.

Related glossary: SWOT, TOWS, strategic planning.

§2 Porter's Five Forces Building

Michael Porter published Competitive Strategy in 1980, and the Five Forces model has been the dominant lens for industry-structure analysis ever since. It answers a specific question: how attractive is this industry to be in, structurally? Some industries are inherently more profitable than others — not because of management quality but because of how the industry's structure squeezes or protects margins.

The five forces:

1. Competitive rivalry. How intense is the competition between existing players? High when there are many competitors of similar size, slow industry growth, low switching costs, low differentiation. Industries with high rivalry (airlines, commodity retailers, casual restaurants) typically have squeezed margins because competition prevents any one player from raising prices.

2. Bargaining power of suppliers. How much can the inputs you depend on raise prices? High when suppliers are concentrated, switching suppliers is costly, or the input is highly differentiated (think: a company that needs a specific patented chemical and only one supplier produces it). High supplier power transfers margin from the industry to the supplier.

3. Bargaining power of buyers. How much can your customers push prices down? High when buyers are concentrated, the product is undifferentiated, switching to competitors is cheap. High buyer power transfers margin from the industry to the customer. B2B businesses selling to a few huge customers face this acutely — losing one buyer can mean losing 20% of revenue.

4. Threat of new entrants. How easy is it for new competitors to enter the industry? Low when there are high barriers to entry — capital requirements, regulatory licensing, network effects, brand recognition, distribution access, proprietary technology. Industries with low entry barriers tend toward commoditization over time.

5. Threat of substitutes. How easily can customers solve their problem with a different category of solution entirely? A taxi company's substitutes are rideshare, public transit, and (recently) remote work. A printed-magazine industry's substitutes were everything that delivered news and entertainment digitally. Substitutes can wipe out an industry's profit pool faster than any of the other four forces.

The combined effect of the five forces determines structural industry attractiveness. The classic example: the U.S. airline industry has high rivalry, moderate supplier power (Boeing/Airbus duopoly), high buyer power (price-sensitive consumers), low entry barriers historically (until consolidated), and meaningful substitutes (rail, video conferencing). All five forces work against industry profitability — which is why airlines have been a famously poor investment for decades despite being a huge industry.

Where the framework lands well: as a structural analysis before entering or doubling down on an industry. Investors use it to evaluate whether an industry can support sustained profits regardless of which player wins. Executives use it to find the leverage points to weaken unfavorable forces (e.g., differentiate to reduce buyer power, vertically integrate to reduce supplier power).

Where it doesn't land: as a real-time tactical framework. Five Forces changes slowly — you don't re-run it every quarter. It also doesn't capture company-specific competitive advantage, which is what determines whether YOU win within the industry's structural constraints.

A diagram showing the five forces arranged around an industry box, with example questions for each force, makes the framework digestible at a glance.

Related glossary: Porter's Five Forces, competitive advantage, industry analysis, moat.

§3 BCG matrix + Ansoff matrix — portfolio thinking and growth direction Building

Two 2×2s that show up constantly in corporate strategy decks. Both are old (1970s); both are simple; both are commonly misused.

The BCG matrix (Boston Consulting Group, 1968-70) is a portfolio framework for companies with multiple products or business units. Each unit gets plotted on two axes: relative market share (high vs low) and market growth rate (high vs low). The four quadrants:

• Stars (high share, high growth): Invest aggressively; these will become future profit engines.
• Cash cows (high share, low growth): Milk for profit; reinvest cash into stars and question marks.
• Question marks (low share, high growth): Place selective bets; the market is growing fast, but you don't yet have a winning position. Some become stars; some become dogs.
• Dogs (low share, low growth): Divest, harvest, or shut down.

The BCG framework was revolutionary in the 1970s for one reason: it gave conglomerates an explicit framework for capital allocation across business units. Instead of treating every unit equally, leadership could systematically take cash from cash cows and fund stars, while pruning dogs. It made the implicit explicit.

The honest read on BCG today: useful as a sorting exercise for genuinely multi-business companies; oversimplified for the strategic decisions it's often pulled into. Market share isn't the only thing that matters (a low-share niche in a small market can be extremely profitable). "Dogs" can be intentional positions (low-cost defense against competitor expansion). The framework also works poorly for software businesses, where market share dynamics behave differently than the manufacturing businesses it was designed for. Use it as a coarse sort, not as the answer.

The Ansoff matrix (Igor Ansoff, 1957) addresses a different question: how does a company grow? Two axes — markets (existing vs new) and products (existing vs new) — produce four growth strategies:

• Market penetration (existing product, existing market): Sell more of what you have to who you have. Lowest risk; typically the first move.
• Market development (existing product, new market): Take what works to new geographies, new customer segments, new use cases.
• Product development (new product, existing market): Build new things for your existing customer base.
• Diversification (new product, new market): The riskiest quadrant — new to both axes. Typically reserved for portfolio plays or step-changes.

The risk ramp is real. Each quadrant moves further from what the company already knows, so the failure rate scales. Most successful growth follows market penetration → then either market or product development → then (cautiously, if at all) diversification.

Where Ansoff lands: as a fast framework to surface what KIND of growth a company is talking about. When a leadership team says "we need to grow 30% next year," asking "which Ansoff quadrant" forces specificity — "we'll grow penetration in the existing book" is a different plan, with different risks and different investments, than "we'll diversify into new products for new markets."

A diagram showing both matrices side-by-side with worked examples in each quadrant helps both frameworks click.

Related glossary: BCG matrix, Ansoff matrix, market share, portfolio strategy.

§4 The 4Ps — the marketing mix scaffold Foundational

The 4Ps of marketing — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — were formalized by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960 and have anchored marketing curricula ever since. They're the standard scaffold for thinking about how a company brings something to market.

Product. What you're selling. Includes the physical product or service itself, packaging, features, quality, variants, branding. The product decisions set the bounds on everything else.

Price. What you charge, plus the broader pricing strategy (premium / parity / discount), discount structures, payment terms, financing options. Price is the only P that directly generates revenue; the other three are costs.

Place. Where and how the product is distributed and made available. Direct-to-consumer, retail, wholesale, online, in-store, through resellers. Place determines who can buy and at what friction level.

Promotion. How customers learn about the product. Advertising, public relations, sales, content marketing, partnerships, events. Promotion drives awareness; the other three Ps determine whether awareness converts to sales.

The framework's value: it forces a marketer (or anyone selling something) to think about all four dimensions instead of optimizing one in isolation. A great product priced wrong fails. A great product priced right but distributed only through the wrong channel fails. A great product distributed and priced right but never promoted stays invisible. The four levers compound — a small adjustment in each can produce big results, while heavy investment in one without adjusting the others often disappoints.

Extended versions exist. The 7Ps add People (the staff customer-facing during the sale), Process (the buying experience itself), and Physical evidence (proof of value — testimonials, certifications, tangible artifacts in services businesses where the "product" is intangible). The 7Ps version became popular for services marketing where the original 4Ps felt thin.

A more recent reframing — the 4Cs — flips the framework from a seller's view to a customer's view: Customer (instead of Product), Cost (Price), Convenience (Place), Communication (Promotion). Same dimensions, different starting point — useful for resisting the temptation to design marketing around what's easy for the seller instead of what's good for the buyer.

The honest read: the 4Ps are checklist-grade thinking. They make sure no major dimension gets ignored, but they don't generate strategy — a brand positioning, a value proposition, a brand voice, those come from elsewhere. A 4Ps analysis with no positioning underneath it is filler.

The signal: when a marketing team presents a 4Ps without first answering "who is this for and what's the promise," they're skipping the load-bearing work. The 4Ps are the implementation of a marketing strategy, not the strategy itself.

A diagram showing the 4Ps in a circle around a "target customer" center, with the 7Ps and 4Cs as overlays, makes the family relationship visible.

Related glossary: 4Ps, marketing mix, positioning, pricing strategy.

§5 OKRs — objectives and key results Building

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) became the dominant goal-setting framework in tech in the 2010s after Google credited them publicly. The structure is simple. The execution is famously hard.

Objective: A qualitative, aspirational statement of what you want to achieve. "Improve customer retention." "Launch in the European market." Not a number; not a deliverable. A direction.

Key Results: 2-5 quantitative, time-bound, measurable outcomes that, if achieved, would mean the Objective was achieved. "Increase Net Revenue Retention from 110% to 125% by end of Q3." "Sign 3 enterprise European customers." "Reduce churn rate from 8% to 5%."

The discipline: an Objective is the WHAT and WHY; Key Results are the HOW-WILL-WE-KNOW. The KRs aren't activities ("ship feature X") — they're outcomes ("achieve metric Y"). Activities are how you might pursue the KR; the KR is the result that matters.

Where OKRs land well: at companies where leadership is willing to be explicit about what matters most and to deprioritize everything else. The framework's value is in forcing prioritization — you can't have 14 Objectives; the framework breaks under that weight. 3-5 Objectives per team per quarter is the typical sustainable shape.

Where OKRs fail: at companies that treat the framework as a tracking tool instead of a prioritization tool. The failure mode looks like this — every team writes 5 Objectives; each Objective has 4-5 KRs; everyone hits 70% of their KRs (which sounds good); but the company didn't ship the one thing that actually mattered because the OKR scoring system rewarded breadth of green checkmarks over depth of delivery on what mattered. The framework became theater.

Two practical rules separate working OKRs from theater OKRs. First, KRs are stretch targets, not commitments. Google's original framing: 70% achievement on a KR is considered success, because if you're hitting 100% you set the bar too low. Companies that treat OKRs as commitments (with consequences for missing) end up with sandbagged KRs that aren't actually ambitious. Second, KRs measure outcomes, not activity. "Ship 10 features" is an activity KR (bad). "Increase weekly active users 25%" is an outcome KR (good). Activity KRs reward looking busy; outcome KRs reward moving the metric.

The most common failure mode: writing OKRs at the start of the quarter, never looking at them again, and pulling them out at the end to score. OKRs are a planning tool only if they're a steering tool — reviewed weekly or biweekly so the team can adjust tactics in flight. Otherwise they're a quarterly performance theater.

The signal in a real OKR practice: weekly OKR check-ins that produce decisions ("the email-onboarding KR is at 35% with 5 weeks left; what changes?"); a culture comfortable with publicly missing ambitious KRs; explicit deprioritization of work that doesn't ladder to a KR. Without all three, the framework is decorative.

A diagram showing a worked OKR with the Objective at the top, 3-4 KRs underneath, and current-quarter tracking values, makes the structure click.

Related glossary: OKRs, objective, key result, goal-setting.

§6 The decision-rights alphabet — DACI, RAPID, MoSCoW Building

Several frameworks address the question of "who decides what" in cross-functional work, and they share more than their differences suggest. RACI is covered in depth in the Org & Roles guide §4 — this section catalogs the most common alternatives, what each adds, and when to reach for them.

DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) — Atlassian's variant. The notable difference from RACI: Driver replaces "Responsible" and emphasizes the project-management role of pushing the decision forward, not just doing the work. Approver is RACI's "Accountable" with a slightly different connotation — Approver signs off; Accountable owns the outcome. DACI is popular at companies where project management is a distinct discipline and the person driving a decision is different from the person doing the underlying work.

RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) — Bain & Company's variant. The notable difference from RACI: it explicitly separates Recommend (the person proposing the decision), Agree (the person whose sign-off is required — often legal or compliance), Decide (the person making the final call), and Perform (the person executing). Useful when a decision has formal gates (regulatory approval, legal review) that RACI's single "Accountable" doesn't capture cleanly.

MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't) — not a decision-rights framework but a prioritization framework, frequently used adjacent to OKRs and roadmaps. Items get categorized as Must-have (non-negotiable for this release), Should-have (important, but the release ships without if needed), Could-have (nice if there's time), Won't-have (explicitly out of scope, named to prevent scope creep). MoSCoW's value: the "Won't" category. Naming what's NOT in scope is harder than naming what is, and most overrun projects fail at the Won't discipline.

Eisenhower matrix (Important × Urgent 2×2) — a personal-productivity framework that occasionally surfaces in business contexts. Four quadrants: Important + Urgent (do now), Important + Not urgent (schedule), Not important + Urgent (delegate), Not important + Not urgent (drop). Most useful for individual time-management; less useful for cross-functional work where "important" and "urgent" are themselves contested.

When to reach for which:

• RACI (Org & Roles §4) — default for cross-functional projects; widely understood; sufficient for most cases.
• DACI — when the driver of a decision and the doer of the work are different roles, or when "driver" framing fits the team's culture better.
• RAPID — when decisions have formal gates that need explicit roles (legal, compliance, regulatory sign-off).
• MoSCoW — when prioritizing scope inside a release or sprint; pairs with OKRs to make trade-offs explicit.

The underlying point across all of these: cross-functional work fails most often because nobody named who decides, who does, who agrees, who's informed. The specific framework matters less than picking ONE and using it. A team that picks RACI and uses it well outperforms a team that argues for a quarter about which framework is best.

A diagram comparing RACI, DACI, and RAPID side-by-side — same project, same stakeholders, three frameworks applied — makes the family relationship visible while showing the differences.

Related glossary: RACI, DACI, RAPID, MoSCoW, Eisenhower matrix, prioritization.

§7 Jobs to be Done and Lean thinking Strategic

Most product strategy failures share a common root: the team understood their product better than they understood the problem it was supposed to solve. Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is the corrective. The core claim is deceptively simple — people don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. The job is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. Your product is one candidate solution for a job that existed before your product did and will exist after it.

The implication is strategic, not just semantic. If you frame your product by category ("we're a note-taking app"), you compete against other note-taking apps. If you frame it by job ("people hire us to capture fleeting ideas before they're lost"), you compete against voice memos, paper notebooks, emailed reminders, and — often — doing nothing. The competitive set looks different; so does the feature prioritisation.

Jobs have three dimensions. The functional job is what the person is literally trying to get done — capture an idea, move funds between accounts, schedule a shift. The emotional job is how they want to feel doing it — competent, in control, not embarrassed. The social job is how they want to be perceived — professional, responsible, innovative. Feature decisions that ignore emotional and social jobs produce technically correct products that nobody loves. The iPhone's design obsession wasn't about the functional job (make and receive calls); it was about the social job (be the person who has this).

Lean thinking is the operational partner to JTBD. Where JTBD is about finding the right problem, Lean is about solving it without waste. The Lean frame starts from the question: what's the minimum work required to deliver value? Waste — overproduction, waiting, unnecessary features, rework — is anything that consumes capacity without advancing the answer. The build-measure-learn loop formalises this: build the smallest testable version of your hypothesis, measure whether it advances the job, learn what to do next. Small batches beat large batches because they surface feedback faster, reduce the cost of being wrong, and shorten the cycle between hypothesis and evidence.

Pull systems (build what's needed when it's needed) beat push systems (build based on forecast, push it to users and hope) because they reduce inventory waste — in product terms, the graveyard of built features nobody uses. JTBD tells you which jobs to hire for; Lean tells you how to build a hiring process that wastes as little as possible proving you got it right.

Related glossary: jobs to be done, lean, build-measure-learn, MVP, product-market fit, customer discovery, waste.

§8 Design thinking and the Double Diamond Strategic

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach built on a premise that sounds obvious but is systematically violated in practice: the problem you started with is rarely the real problem. Most organisations jump from symptoms to solutions, skipping the work of defining what's actually broken. Design thinking is the discipline of doing that definition work before committing to solutions.

The Double Diamond is the canonical framework for design thinking, developed by the UK Design Council and now embedded in most design and innovation curricula. It maps the process as two successive diamonds — two cycles of divergence and convergence. The shape is the insight: expanding to explore before narrowing to commit, twice. The first diamond diverges to discover and then converges to define. The second diamond diverges to develop options and then converges to deliver a specific solution.

Discover (first diverge) is the research phase — going out into the world to understand what's actually happening. This means user interviews, observation, competitor review, data analysis. The goal is to encounter reality, not to confirm assumptions. Define (first converge) translates raw discovery into a clear problem statement — the design challenge the team will actually solve. The problem statement is the output; it typically takes the form of a "How Might We" question. "How might we help small business owners understand their cash position without spending time on bookkeeping?" is a defined problem; "improve the accounting experience" is not.

Develop (second diverge) is the ideation and prototyping phase — generating multiple possible solutions to the defined problem, then building rough, cheap versions to test. Deliver (second converge) is the phase of building, testing, and refining the solution that best solves the defined problem for real users.

The "5 interviews" rule comes from Nielsen Norman Group's research finding that 5 user interviews with members of the same user segment identify approximately 85% of the usability problems present. This doesn't mean you only ever do 5 interviews — it means the marginal return on interviews drops sharply past 5 within a segment. The practical implication: don't wait for a sample size of 30 to start synthesising. Early, directional research is more valuable than delayed, comprehensive research.

Design thinking breaks down when the problem is already well-defined. For clearly specified engineering challenges (build a system that processes 10,000 transactions per second with 99.9% uptime), the discover-define phases add overhead without value. The method is best suited to ambiguous problems with human behaviour at their centre — which is most product strategy work, and very little of pure engineering.

Related glossary: design thinking, double diamond, user research, prototype, how might we, problem statement, jobs to be done.

§9 Delivery methodologies — Waterfall, Agile, and the improvement loop Strategic

Every framework above helps a team decide what to do. Delivery methodologies govern how the work actually gets built — and the choice between them is one of the most consequential operating decisions a team makes. The whole field organises around a single tension: how much do you commit to a plan upfront versus how much do you adapt as you learn?

Waterfall sits at one end. Work moves through fixed phases — requirements, design, build, test, release — and each finishes before the next begins. It is predictable, easy to document, and well-suited to work where requirements are genuinely stable and the cost of a late change is high: construction, hardware, regulated systems. Its weakness is its premise. Waterfall commits to a full plan before the team has learned anything, so when requirements shift mid-project — which, in software, they almost always do — the cost of that rigidity lands late, when it is most expensive to absorb.

Agile is the response. Instead of one long sequence, work ships in small increments, each exposed to feedback that shapes the next. Agile trades long-term predictability for the ability to change direction cheaply. It is not a single method but a philosophy, codified in the 2001 Agile Manifesto, with two dominant implementations. Scrum organises work into fixed-length sprints with defined roles and ceremonies — sprint planning, the daily standup, the review, and the retrospective — pulling from a prioritised backlog. Kanban drops the fixed sprint entirely: work flows continuously across a board, and the core discipline is capping how much is in progress at once, which is what makes bottlenecks visible. Scrum suits teams that benefit from a planning cadence; Kanban suits continuous, unpredictable streams of work like support and operations.

The second family is about improving a process rather than running a project. Lean, born in the Toyota Production System, frames everything through the customer's definition of value and treats the rest as waste to remove. Six Sigma brings statistical rigour to reducing defects and variation, working through the DMAIC cycle — Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control — and the two are so often combined that "Lean Six Sigma" is its own discipline. Kaizen is the cultural engine underneath both: continuous, incremental improvement driven by the people closest to the work, betting that many small front-line gains beat occasional top-down redesigns.

The operator's mistake, across all of these, is to adopt the ceremonies without the discipline. A team that runs standups and sprints while still locking scope and dates upfront is doing Waterfall in Agile costume. A board with no work-in-progress limit is a to-do list, not Kanban. The method is a tool matched to a specific condition — how fast requirements change and how quickly feedback arrives — not an identity to perform. Pick the one that fits the work, and keep only the rituals that are earning their keep.

Waterfall — sequential Requirements Design Build Test Release Plan upfront. Change gets costly late.

Agile — iterative Plan Build Review Test iterate Scrum · Kanban Short cycles. Adapt to feedback.

The improvement family — improving the process, not running a project Lean Remove waste. Maximise customer value. Six Sigma Cut defects and variation. DMAIC cycle. Kaizen Continuous small gains, driven from the front line.

Related glossary: Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Sprint, Backlog, Daily Standup, Retrospective, Velocity, Burndown Chart, Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Gantt Chart, Critical Path.

§10 What to remember

Seven things to carry:

1. SWOT alone is a list, not a strategy. The cross-quadrant move (TOWS) is where the strategic ideas come from.
2. Porter's Five Forces is about industries, not companies. It tells you whether an industry is structurally profitable; not whether you'll win within it.
3. BCG and Ansoff are simple sorting tools. Useful for surfacing what you're actually deciding; not a substitute for judgment.
4. The 4Ps are checklist-grade. They make sure no marketing dimension is ignored; they don't generate brand positioning.
5. OKRs work if you deprioritize and review weekly. Without both, they're theater.
6. Decision-rights frameworks (RACI, DACI, RAPID, MoSCoW) matter less than picking ONE and using it. The structure is the value; the specific letters are detail.
7. Delivery methodologies are about iteration speed, not ceremony. Match the method to how fast requirements change and feedback arrives. Running the rituals without the underlying discipline is Waterfall in Agile costume.

The lens that ties them together: frameworks are scaffolding for thinking, not substitutes for it. A team that uses them as inputs to a decision outperforms a team that treats the framework as the decision.

§11 Related Glossary terms

Strategy: SWOT, TOWS, Porter's Five Forces, BCG matrix, Ansoff matrix, strategic planning.

Marketing: 4Ps, 7Ps, marketing mix, positioning, pricing strategy.

Goal-setting: OKRs, objective, key result.

Decision-rights and prioritization: RACI, DACI, RAPID, MoSCoW, Eisenhower matrix.

Competitive: competitive advantage, industry analysis, moat, market share.

Delivery and process: Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Sprint, Backlog, Daily Standup, Retrospective, Velocity, Burndown Chart, Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Gantt Chart, Critical Path.