The Red Bars Framework
Three steps. Not a mindset. Not a philosophy. A repeatable process for anyone who wants to find what works faster than the people around them.
Where it comes from
A Jamf all-hands. A slide showing Blockbuster, Borders, Nokia, Kodak — giants wiped out. Then the Jamf logo appeared next to them. The message: we don't want to end up here.
Everyone got vague about what to do about it. "Be more innovative." "Embrace change." Nothing actionable.
I spent a year figuring out the actual mechanism. Not the theory — the process. What separates people who break through from people who plateau? The answer was Red Bars.
The Mario analogy
Think about playing Super Mario Bros for the first time. You start a new level. You die immediately — no idea there was a Goomba right there. Red bar.
You try again. Get past the Goomba, fall into a pit. Red bar. Again. Past the pit, Koopa shell bounces back. Red bar.
But every death teaches you something. After enough red bars, you beat the level without dying.
Most people focus on the green bar — the breakthrough, the success, the finished product. But the green bar is just the output. The red bars are the mechanism. You can't get to the green bar without collecting enough red ones first.
Innovation isn't about being smart enough to get it right. It's about being willing to collect red bars fast enough to find what works.
The three steps
STEP 01
Find the bottleneck
What sucks? Where is the friction? What do people complain about but nobody fixes? What slows everything down?
Bottlenecks are where the red bars live. If there's no friction, there's nothing to improve. The skill is asking "why do we do it this way?" with genuine curiosity instead of defensiveness.
Most bottlenecks are invisible until someone decides to actually look.
STEP 02
Walk through two-way doors
Not every decision is equal. One-way doors are permanent — high stakes, slow down, get it right. Two-way doors are reversible — you can walk back through if it doesn't work.
Most decisions people treat as one-way are actually two-way. When you recognize a decision is reversible, you stop overthinking it and start experimenting. That's where the red bars come from.
Two-way doors are the entry point to the iteration cycle.
STEP 03
Collect your red bars
Take immense action. Don't think about doing the thing — do the thing. Each attempt that doesn't work eliminates a wrong path and points toward a right one.
The goal isn't to avoid red bars. The goal is to collect them faster than everyone else.
Speed of iteration is the real competitive advantage. The person who runs 10 experiments in the time it takes others to run 1 has a 10x data advantage. That's not luck. That's the system.
The identity principle
The framework only works if you actually become a red bar collector. Not "I'm trying to be innovative." Not "I'm working on my mindset."
I am a red bar collector.
When collecting red bars is who you are, you stop feeling shame about failure and start feeling energized by it. Each stumble is proof you're still playing the game.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Red Bars framework?
A three-step process for iterating faster: find the bottleneck, walk through two-way doors, collect your red bars. Each "red bar" is a failed experiment that teaches you something and eliminates a wrong path.
How is this different from "fail fast"?
Fail fast is a vibe. Red Bars is a process. It gives you specific steps: where to look for experiments (bottlenecks), how to evaluate if a decision is worth experimenting on (two-way door test), and how to extract learning from failures systematically (the red bar log).
Can this be applied to AI agents?
Yes — and it works better. AI didn't change the Red Bars framework. It changed the clock speed. At 1B tokens/month, betkerbuilds can run more experiments in one night than most human teams run in a quarter. The same logic applies — the machine just collects red bars faster.
Where did Red Bars come from?
From a keynote I built for 50+ sales engineers at Jamf in 2024, after a meeting where the S-curve of company growth clicked for me. I needed to make "be more innovative" into something actionable. Red Bars was the result.