The Murder Axis: Prioritizing Under Pressure

This is a case study in the series behind How I Whiteboard Product Interviews Live. For the full repeatable method, see The Live Whiteboard Method in the playbook.

The prompt was a prioritization exercise at Instacart. Live Miro board, a clock running, and a stack of candidate work to sort against the business. The framing stickies the interviewer dropped on the canvas were blunt: "Goals for today. Understand how Kate would approach this."

Here is how I approached it.

I diagrammed the process before I solved anything

The first thing I put on the board was not a priority. It was a three-box flow: Roles and responsibilities, then What is driving us, then Prioritization, connected with arrows. I was sequencing the problem out loud before touching it: first understand who decides and how they want to work, then understand the goal, then and only then prioritize.

That matters in a timed exercise. It tells the interviewer you are not going to start ranking features in a vacuum. You are going to align on the goal first, because a priority list is only as good as the goal it serves.

I anchored to the one metric that mattered

Under "What is driving us" I pulled out the load-bearing constraint and made it big: the hyper-specific number we needed to move "or else." In this case, a retention cliff: people were not renewing past the third month. I tagged it "problem-driven" to separate it from the feature wish-list, because the fastest way to make a prioritization meaningless is to let every shiny idea compete on equal footing with the one thing that actually threatens the business.

Everything downstream had to earn its place against that number.

The Murder axis

Then the centerpiece: a 2x2, but with axes named in plain, visceral language instead of the usual sterile labels.

The vertical axis was pain. Not "low impact to high impact." It ran from "Mild annoyance" at the bottom up to "Murder" at the top, annotated with what that actually meant: number of people affected, dollars lost, real human pain. The horizontal axis was not effort. It was "Readiness: can we start tomorrow?", with a discovery checklist on the ready end (technical feasibility, research, data, people) and an honest "????????" zone on the far end for the things we did not yet know enough to size.

Renaming the axes was the most important move on the board. "Murder versus Mild annoyance" reframes prioritization as "how badly does this hurt real people," and everyone in the room instantly understands it and repeats it back. "Readiness" instead of "effort" captures something effort misses: sometimes the blocker is not how much work a thing is, it is that we do not even know enough to begin.

I scored with tiers, not numbers

I did not assign RICE digits. Under time pressure, a spreadsheet you have to defend is the wrong output. So I tagged clusters with three action tiers: "Let's go" for high pain and ready, "Prepare, next" for things that needed a bit of runway, and "Get more ready" for the painful things that were not yet feasible. Then I rebuilt the same set as a clean ranked column on the right, reusing those three labels, so the messy 2x2 resolved into a sorted list a stakeholder could act on Monday.

The tradeoffs showed themselves spatially. A thing high on "Murder" but stuck in the "????????" readiness zone visibly landed in "Get more ready." I did not have to argue that it was painful but not yet doable. The board said it for me.

I pressure-tested a real idea against the metric

Before wrapping, I took one candidate feature, a notifications panel, and ran a small assumption-validation pass on it: what we were hoping it would do (increase reply rates), and how we would know. That is the close-the-loop move. It is not enough to place a feature in "Let's go." You have to be able to say how you would know it actually moved the number you anchored on.

What the board was really showing

None of this is exotic. There is no proprietary framework here. What the board demonstrates is a way of thinking that someone else can follow:

• Align on the goal before ranking anything.
• Force every item to serve the one metric that matters.
• Make the tradeoff visible and memorable instead of asserting it.
• Decide in tiers a stakeholder can act on, not scores they have to trust.
• Close the loop: how would we know this worked.

That is the job. Not the answer, the legibility of the thinking.

If you want to see this live, bring me a real product problem and watch me whiteboard it end to end: that is the Watch Me Think offer. To practice the method yourself, the Whiteboard Prompt Translator scaffolds the six frames from any prompt.