CRISP Framework

I didn't sit down one day and decide to create a framework.

What happened is that I kept getting handed the hard projects — the ones where half the room said it would never work, the other half wasn't sure what we were building, and somehow I still had to ship something. LockGuard was one of them. The Spanish market told me flatly they would never sell it. Leadership thought it was a distraction. I had to get everyone aligned before a single line of code was written.

That kept happening. Different companies, different industries, same dynamic. So I started paying attention to it — what actually got the right people on board, what derailed things, where the real blockers lived. It was never the technology. It was always the clarity, or the lack of it.

When I got laid off in 2023, I finally had space to make that instinct explicit. I called it CRISP. Not because I invented something new, but because I'd been living a pattern for years and finally wrote it down.

What it is

Five stages. Each one designed to surface what teams usually avoid.

Clarify is where most product failures actually begin — and where most teams skip ahead. Everyone in the room has a different interpretation of the problem, but nobody says it out loud because naming the disagreement feels slower than pretending it doesn't exist. Clarify forces the uncomfortable question: what are we actually solving, for whom, and what does success look like? Not meeting-room agreement where people nod to end the conversation. Real agreement.

Research is about confronting reality before forming opinions. What do users actually do — not what they say they do? What does the market actually look like? The goal is truth, not validation of what you already think. This distinction sounds obvious. It is almost never practiced.

Innovate is the stage where the best idea should win — not the first idea, not the loudest voice in the room. It means generating options before locking into a solution, asking what the simplest version looks like, asking what you'd build if you approached it completely differently.

Strategize is where you get honest about execution. Most roadmaps look coherent in slides and fall apart in contact with organizational reality — budget constraints, technical debt, team capacity, political dynamics that nobody put in the deck. This is where you account for all of it.

Pursue is about protecting what you set out to build. Scope creeps. Requirements shift. The original vision gets compromised to death through a hundred small decisions, each of which seems reasonable in isolation. Pursue is the stage that fights for the thing you meant to ship.

What happened when I tried to sell it

In 2023 I launched CRISP as a standalone company — a self-guided toolkit for entrepreneurs and product managers, with consulting services attached.

One person bought the toolkit. No consulting opportunities materialized. The commercial experiment failed.

I'm not particularly embarrassed by this. I used the framework itself to evaluate it — specifically the Clarify stage — and I understood the problem I was solving well enough. What I didn't interrogate hard enough was whether people were desperate enough to pay for the solution. That gap, between a real problem and an urgent one, is now something I watch for explicitly.

I also built Quedar during this period — a full app, coded by me, designed around an insight I genuinely believed in. I was too conservative with it. I was too slow to test whether the market cared as much as I did. I knew how to use the framework. I still failed, because knowing a framework and having the courage to act on what it tells you are different things.

Those are two of the more useful failures I've had.

What it is now

I have a full-time job. CRISP is no longer a company I'm trying to build.

What it is instead is the way I work — the actual operating system behind every project in this portfolio. The Mondly research that surfaced the confidence gap came from the Research stage applied honestly, without a predetermined answer. The LockGuard internal alignment battle was a Clarify problem at its core. The Outdoor Pad PIN decision that turned out to be wrong — that's a Pursue failure, a moment where execution diverged from what the evidence was telling us.

I use it now with AI running alongside every stage: faster research, sharper synthesis during Clarify, rapid prototyping during Innovate. The framework didn't change. The speed at which you can move through it did.

CRISP is here because I want the people who read this to understand not just what I've shipped, but how I think about shipping things. The framework is the connective tissue. The projects are the proof.

If any of this sounds like the room you're currently sitting in — the one where the problem statement keeps shifting, where alignment is performed rather than real, where the uncomfortable question nobody's asking is the one that matters most — I'm happy to think through it with you.