A product strategy states who the product is for, which problems it will solve first, and why customers will choose it over the alternatives. It is owned by the head of product and agreed with the chief executive, engineering, sales and customer success.
A complete product strategy for a fictional organization: accounts payable automation software company selling to mid-market finance teams.
| Organization | Accounts payable automation software company selling to mid-market finance teams (80 staff) |
|---|---|
| Ambition | Be the accounts payable product that purchase-order-heavy mid-market companies pick in a head-to-head evaluation, because seven in ten of their invoices post without anyone touching them. |
| Horizon | 18 months |
The product serves 460 customers and $11M in recurring revenue, processing about 2.1 million invoices a month. Invoice capture, once the reason customers bought, is now a standard feature of every competitor and of the ERP vendors' own modules. Only 38% of purchase-order-backed invoices post without a clerk touching them, and those are 62% of volume. Win rate in competitive evaluations is 19%, and gross revenue retention has slipped to 86%. Last year 45% of engineering time went to upkeep of 11 ERP connectors and one-off customer requests, although four ERPs account for 83% of revenue.
Challenges| Vision | A purchase-order invoice arrives, matches to the order and the receipt line by line, and is scheduled for payment without anyone in accounts payable opening it. The team spends its day on the few invoices that deserve judgment. |
|---|---|
| Time frame | Three years for the full vision. This strategy covers the first 18 months, to the end of Q2 2028, and is judged on touchless rate and competitive win rate. |
| Target customer | The controller or accounts payable manager at a multi-entity distributor or manufacturer with 200 to 2,000 staff, a team of three to eight clerks and 3,000 to 15,000 invoices a month, most of them against purchase orders. |
|---|---|
| Problem | Invoices rarely match the order exactly. Partial shipments, price changes, freight lines and unit-of-measure differences turn into exceptions that sit for a median of 6.2 days while a clerk chases a buyer or the warehouse by email. Early-payment discounts are missed and month-end accruals are guesses. |
| Current alternative | The ERP's own matching screen, which works at header level and fails on partial receipts, backed by spreadsheets and a shared inbox. Some have bought a capture tool and still match by hand. |
| Why now | Most finance teams we sell to have not added headcount in three years while their invoice volume grew. The four core ERPs now have cloud versions with open APIs for orders and receipts, which makes line-level matching outside the ERP practical for the first time. |
| We are the only | Accounts payable product built for purchase-order-heavy mid-market companies that matches every invoice line to the order and the receipt, and routes each exception to the person who can fix it. |
|---|---|
| Differentiators | Line-level two-way and three-way matching with tolerance rules per supplier and category. Exceptions sent to the buyer or receiver with the fix proposed, not parked with a clerk. Deep integrations with four ERPs that read orders and receipts in near real time and post without correction. |
| Where we will not compete | Services businesses with mostly non-purchase-order invoices, where approval routing is enough and cheaper tools are adequate. Companies that want one suite for cards, expenses and procurement. Any deal where the buyer's main criterion is the number of ERPs supported. |
| Bet | Hypothesis | Evidence so far | Investment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line-level matching engine | Taking touchless rate on purchase-order invoices from 38% to 70% wins evaluations that capture accuracy no longer decides | Six design partners reached 64% in a ten-week beta; lost-deal notes cite matching in 31 of the last 50 losses | 9 engineers for 12 months |
| Exception routing outside accounts payable | Sending a price or quantity exception straight to the buyer or receiver cuts resolution from 6.2 days to under 2 | 55% of exceptions need an answer from someone outside finance; a prototype approval by email link resolved 70% within a day | 5 engineers, 1 designer |
| Depth on four ERPs | Reading orders, receipts and entity structures natively removes posting failures and the custom work behind them | 4.8% of invoices fail to post on the first attempt; four ERPs hold 83% of revenue | 6 engineers; 7 connectors frozen |
| Payments as the retention layer | Customers who pay suppliers through the product stay, because the payment run becomes a weekly habit | Gross retention is 95% for the 64 customers with payments active and 84% for the rest | 3 engineers plus a payments partner |
Priorities and measures
Purchase-order invoices are 62% of volume and the least automated part of the product. Touchless rate is now the number buyers compare, so this is where the engineering time released elsewhere goes.
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purchase-order invoices posted with no manual touch | 38% | 70% | Q1 2028 |
| Median time to resolve a matching exception | 6.2 days | 2 days | Q1 2028 |
| Early-payment discounts captured on purchase-order invoices, as a share of those offered | 21% | 45% | Q2 2028 |
Four ERPs hold 83% of revenue, but connector upkeep is spread across eleven. Matching only works when orders and receipts are read reliably, which needs depth that eleven connectors cannot all get.
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Invoices that fail to post to the ERP on the first attempt | 4.8% | 1% | Q4 2027 |
| Engineering time spent on connector upkeep and one-off customer requests | 45% | 20% | Q4 2027 |
A 19% win rate reflects a product pitched to every finance team. Narrowing to purchase-order-heavy companies lets sales lead with a proof on the buyer's own invoices.
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Win rate in competitive evaluations | 19% | 32% | Q2 2028 |
| New recurring revenue from the target segment | 44% | 70% | Q2 2028 |
Retention is eleven points higher where payments are active, but only 64 customers use them. Most have never been shown the payment run inside the approval flow they already use.
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customers with payments active | 14% | 40% | Q2 2028 |
| Gross revenue retention | 86% | 90% | Q2 2028 |
The same structure with a prompt in every field. Copy it, or download it as a Word or Excel file.
| Organization | [Describe your organization in a few words, with its size] |
|---|---|
| Ambition | [One sentence on where you want to be at the end of the plan] |
| Horizon | [How long the plan runs, for example 12 months] |
[Where things stand today: the facts that make this strategy necessary]
Challenges| Vision | [Your vision] |
|---|---|
| Time frame | [Your time frame] |
| Target customer | [Your target customer] |
|---|---|
| Problem | [Your problem] |
| Current alternative | [Your current alternative] |
| Why now | [Your why now] |
| We are the only | [Your we are the only] |
|---|---|
| Differentiators | [Your differentiators] |
| Where we will not compete | [Your where we will not compete] |
| Bet | Hypothesis | Evidence so far | Investment |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Bet] | [Hypothesis] | [Evidence so far] | [Investment] |
| [Bet] | [Hypothesis] | [Evidence so far] | [Investment] |
| [Bet] | [Hypothesis] | [Evidence so far] | [Investment] |
Priorities and measures
[Why this priority matters now, in one or two sentences]
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
[Why this priority matters now, in one or two sentences]
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
[Why this priority matters now, in one or two sentences]
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
[Why this priority matters now, in one or two sentences]
| Outcome | Baseline | Target | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
| [Metric you will track] | [Where it is today] | [Where it should be] | [When] |
Describe the target customer narrowly enough that sales could disqualify a deal with it. Size, industry and one trait that predicts the problem, such as invoice mix here.
Write the problem as the customer experiences it today, with the current alternative named. If the alternative is a spreadsheet or a competitor's module, say so.
Limit the bets to what the engineering team can staff. Add up the people in the investment column and check the total against headcount.
For each bet, record the evidence you already have and what result would make you stop. A bet without a kill condition is a roadmap item.
State where you will not compete and tell sales. A positioning choice that sales has not heard is not a choice yet.
Pick one product measure that customers also care about and make it the headline outcome, then set baselines from your own usage data.
A plan only works if it is reviewed on a rhythm. This is the cadence the example assumes.
| Check-in | Outcome owners update progress and confidence weekly. |
|---|---|
| Review | Priority owners review outcomes and unblock initiatives monthly. |
| Reset | Leadership revisits priorities and targets quarterly. |
Tability keeps this cadence for you. Each priority becomes an objective, each outcome a key result with its baseline and target, and each initiative a tracked task. Owners get a check-in reminder and the plan shows what is on track.
Track this plan in TabilityStill comparing tools? See the 10 best strategy software tools.
It should include a product vision with a time frame, the target customer and the problem being solved, positioning against the alternatives, a short list of strategic bets with the evidence and investment for each, and the principles that guide trade-offs. Finish with a few measurable outcomes so the team can tell whether the bets are paying off.
The strategy explains who the product is for, which problems come first and why that creates an advantage. The roadmap is the sequence of work that follows from it. A roadmap can change every quarter while the strategy holds for a year or more. If the roadmap changes and nobody can say which strategic bet it serves, the strategy is missing.
Two to four pages is enough for most products. It needs to be short enough that engineers, designers and sales reps read it, and specific enough to settle arguments about priorities. Supporting research, market sizing and financial models belong in appendices, not in the strategy itself.
Three or four for a team of 20 to 40 engineers. Each bet should have a hypothesis, the evidence so far and named people working on it. More than four usually means some bets have one or two engineers, which is too few to prove anything within a year.
The head of product writes it, with input from engineering, design, sales and customer success. The chief executive should agree it, because it commits the company to some customers and not others. Product managers then write the plans for their own areas within it.
Be the field service product a contractor with 5 to 49 technicians can set up in two weeks and that technicians choose to use, taking net revenue retention from 97% to 104%.
Be the primary operating account for half of our small business customers by mid 2028, so the bank's cheapest deposits grow again.
Be the store where a home mechanic knows a part fits before buying it, and grow sales from $24M to $27M on the same paid traffic.
Be the field service product a contractor with 5 to 49 technicians can set up in two weeks and that technicians choose to use, taking net revenue retention from 97% to 104%.
Be the primary operating account for half of our small business customers by mid 2028, so the bank's cheapest deposits grow again.
Be the store where a home mechanic knows a part fits before buying it, and grow sales from $24M to $27M on the same paid traffic.
Product strategy template
Horizon: 18 months
4 priorities · 9 outcomes
Targets are illustrative. Adapt them to your baseline before you start.