A strategy template to rule them all

A simple 1-page template for getting your team in sync about your product strategy, with all that’s required and none of the fluff.

What’s out there isn’t working

Strategy templates should be concise and include examples! Existing ones are failing product leaders and CEOs because they:

1. Don’t fit on a single page, making it hard to keep the context in mind

2. Fail to provide the tickler questions needed to create the content

3. Rarely take into account the business implications required for success

4. Never have examples! And…

5. Are frequently indistinguishable from mission and vision templates and roadmap ones, which are not the same as strategy!

Today I’ll improve upon what’s out there and share:

• My one-page product strategy template

• The tickler questions that help you formulate each answer

• An example pulled end to end using SpaceX’s Starlink product¹

• A blank copy of the template you can download and copy to get started

So let’s start again!

We’re going to run through each topic, and we will keep our answers concise. You will probably notice that writing this document requires buy-in from across an entire business, so if you’re a product manager, don’t go it alone.

Vision … but wait, why?

We must start with the vision, because the vision is the end state our customers will experience that the strategy is designed to achieve, so without a pithy reference to our vision, the whole document loses its anchoring. The rest of the document will describe how to get there. This is descriptive and should be focused on clarity internally, not marketing power externally. Remember, this document is for alignment of effort, not for selling.

For vision, here are the tickler questions:

• What future state are we trying to create?

• How does the world change for our customer in the future?

• What will the customer actually put their hands on in that future?

Here’s what Starlink’s might have said early on:

Internet access via satellites from anywhere on Earth.

The words themselves are not sexy, but it is clear and concise. As customers, we know we will receive the ability to connect to the internet no matter where we are on Earth. We don’t know the exact features or the form factor, but we have a solid idea of what’s in it for us if we go along for the ride.

Big problem being solved, and the ancillary ones

Now we move on to what problem the vision state solves for.

For problem solved, here are the tickler questions:

• What need does this vision address?

• How is the problem currently underserved?

• Why is solving it important to the customer?

Starlink example:

People in remote locations cannot access land-based internet services, and are thus excluded from the digital economy.

Further, existing solutions are low-bandwidth, unreliable, and not self-service.

What makes our approach special?

Now we dip into what the solution looks like and why we can be best in the world at delivering it.

For our approach, here are the tickler questions:

• What are the key benefits of our product (with passing reference to the pains experienced by the customer in the status quo)?

• How is it differentiated?

• Why will we be superior as a team or company?

• What is our unique opinion about how to solve the problem?

Starlink example:

1. High-speed (100+ Mbps), low-latency (<50 ms), high-bandwidth internet
2. Easy at-home self-setup with flexible subscription terms
3. Portable terminal you can take with you
4. No one can get satellites to space more efficiently than SpaceX
5. Support from low-Earth orbit (LEO) to enable #1

Who is this for?

Now we need to define our customers. Who will our beachhead customers be that adopt the technology first?

For customer profiles, here are the tickler questions:

• Who has the problem we’re solving for most acutely?

• What behavioral or demographic attributes describe them?

• What market niche are they in?

• What unique circumstances are they struggling with?

Starlink example:

Residential customers in rural or remote areas with limited or no access to terrestrial internet options. 

Governments and NGOs providing internet access in disaster zones or developing countries.

Mobile users such as travelers, truckers, or boaters.

How will we reach them?

What marketing and go-to-market tactics will we use to reach our target customers as described above?

For GTM, here are the tickler questions:

• What methods will we use to get in touch with our future customers?

• What distribution and partnership channels might we employ?

• By what mechanism will we sell?

Starlink example:

Direct online sales.
Targeted online advertising.
Partnerships with rural communities and businesses.

What does success look like?

What measurable results are we aiming to achieve across different measures of success?

For success metrics, here are the tickler questions:

• How many customers do we need?

• What revenue will validate our approach?

• What sort of product usage traction do we expect?

• What guardrail metrics should we protect?

Starlink example:

1M subscribers within 12 months
99.5% uptime at >50 Mbps 
$500M in revenue
50 satellites launched per year

What most stands in our way?

This is where we get to our step-by-step plan. I like to conceptualize it by thinking through the obstacles to success and then imagining how to remove them.

For the obstacles and plan section, the tickler questions are:

• What are the largest obstacles to achieving these business outcomes?

• What are the largest obstacles to achieving these product outcomes?

Starlink example:

We need a large coordinated constellation of satellites in LEO
We need to build a user-friendly dish and Wi-Fi router
We need simple-to-use software for users to control access
We need a way for sales to penetrate deep into remote communities

You can take this a step further and go into more detail, but in reality, this list is the final output. Taking into account everything above, what do we need to actually get done to realize the vision? In this case, it’s building the constellation, the at-home devices, and the ground network among remote community members.

How will we support our customers?

Don’t forget your plan for how you will keep customers happy and unblocked.

Customer Success tickler question:

• How will customers interface with us?

• What will happen when there is a serious or urgent issue?

• How will customers gain knowledge about our product?

Online help center and in-app customer support, with Tier 2 live agent support and community forums

Closing thoughts

I’m not trying to pretend these one-pagers answer every single question each team needs to execute, but that isn’t their purpose. I’ve seen strategy documents in the 20+-page range, and I’ve seen ones where most of that was fluff and ones where most of it was valuable. The purpose here is to drive cross-company alignment about what we’re building, for whom, how we will reach them, why it will be hard, how we will win in spite of that, and how we’ll continue to cultivate success in the long term.

Templates

Here is what the complete

one-pager looks like for Starlink. You can see that it is easy to review and to provide feedback on, and that this model forces us to make tough tradeoff decisions instead of hiding uncertainty in long-form paragraphs of text.

Here is a blank template with the tickler questions for your own use.

You can also try my Strategy One-Pager CustomGPT that takes a topic and runs it through this exercise automatically.

1. I derived the results for the SpaceX Starlink example loosely based on what I’ve seen in the market. They are not approved or reviewed by SpaceX, nor are these substantially researched beyond some basic, plausible answers.