Strategy
One page product strategy
The customer you are serving, the problem worth solving, the approach you are betting on, what you are deliberately not doing, and the conditions that have to hold for any of it to work.
What it is
A product strategy says how you intend to win in a market you have chosen. The one page format holds the market, the customer, the problem, the approach, what you are deliberately not doing, and how you will know it is working.
Richard Rumelt's argument in Good Strategy Bad Strategy applies directly. Most documents called strategy are goals with adjectives attached. A strategy has a diagnosis of the situation, a way of dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions that follow from both. If you can drop a competitor's name into your page and it still reads true, you have written a description rather than a strategy.
The section doing the most work is the one naming what you are not doing. A strategy is a set of choices, and a page with no refusals on it has not made any.
When to use it
- A team is asking why this market and this customer, and the answer so far has been a revenue target.
- You are heading into a planning cycle and want the choices settled before the roadmap.
- Two parts of the business are building for different customers under one product name.
- A new leader has arrived and the reasoning behind the current direction lives in people's heads.
What is in it
- The customer we are serving
- The problem worth solving
- Our approach
- What we are not doing
- How we will know it is working
- What has to be true
The template
Owner [name] / Agreed with [names and roles] / Date [date] / Next review [date]
The customer we are serving
One group, described tightly enough to exclude people. Role, situation and the moment they come looking. Name the groups you are choosing not to serve in this period, because a strategy that serves everyone commits to nothing.
For example, finance leads at companies of 200 to 2,000 staff who have just outgrown their spreadsheet close, and not the sole practitioner bookkeepers who make up most of our free signups.
The problem worth solving
What that group is stuck on, what it costs them, and why the alternatives they use today leave it unsolved. This is diagnosis, so write what is actually happening rather than what you plan to do about it.
Our approach
The bet. Three or four sentences on how you intend to solve the problem, and what makes that route available to you and hard for others to take. If the approach would read the same for any company in the category, it is not yet a strategy.
What we are not doing
The commitments this approach rules out for the next four quarters, each with the reason. This is the section that gets tested in the first budget conversation, and the one that makes the rest credible.
- [Thing we are not building, and why it is out]
- [Segment we are not chasing, and why]
- [Channel or partnership we are declining, and why]
How we will know it is working
Two or three measures, each with a baseline, a target and a date. One of them should be a leading measure you can read within the quarter, so the strategy can be corrected rather than only graded.
| Measure | Baseline | Target | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paying accounts in the target segment | 140 | 500 | Dec 2026 |
| Share of new accounts live in week one | 22% | 40% | Mar 2026 |
| Support contacts per account per month | 1.8 | 1.0 | Jun 2026 |
What has to be true
The conditions the whole page rests on, with the evidence you have for each and what would disprove it. Where a condition is unproven, say who is testing it and by when.
| Condition | Evidence today | What would disprove it | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| This segment will switch tools mid financial year | 6 of 11 buyer calls said they would | A quarter of pipeline stalling on timing | [name] |
Review the page on the date at the top rather than when someone asks for it. Most strategies are not overtaken by a competitor, they are overtaken by a condition in the last table quietly becoming false while everybody keeps executing.
Questions people ask
- How is a strategy different from a roadmap?
- A strategy says which market, which customer and which approach. A roadmap says what you will work on next in service of that. Writing the roadmap first is how teams end up with a busy plan and no argument behind it.
- How long should a product strategy last?
- Long enough to act on, usually a year or more. If it changes every quarter, it was a plan.
- Who should write it?
- The product leader, with the people who would have to live with it. A strategy written alone and circulated for comment collects comments rather than commitment.
- What if leadership has not chosen a market?
- Say so on the page rather than assuming one. A strategy that records an open disagreement as a settled choice sends everyone downstream planning against something nobody agreed.