The Strategy Contract
A one-page doc sitting between vision and roadmap that every pod writes for itself.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Charles defines strategy as neither a roadmap nor a vision, but the thing in between: how you get to your goals. Each pod writes its own strategy doc built from a fixed set of bullet points—goals, hypothesis, right-to-win, metrics, initiatives, risks, and long-term outcomes. Leadership then checks each pod's doc aligns with the higher-level product strategy and the company's financial plan.
Origin
Geoff Charles at Ramp, describing how Ramp replaced expensive quarterly OKR planning (a month every quarter) with a bi-annual one-pager of company priorities plus per-pod strategy docs.
Core principles
- 01Strategy is how you reach goals—distinct from vision (why) and roadmap (what/when)
- 02Pods are organized against outcomes, so each pod can own a self-contained strategy
- 03The more teams think like the leader, the more leverage the leader gains over time
- 04Accuracy has cost—only plan precisely for the moments where precision has high value (market moments), and stay loose elsewhere
How to run it
- 1
State the goals
Define what you want to see in the world—the outcomes the pod is organized against.
- 2
Write the hypothesis and its evidence
Explain why you think this will work and the data behind that belief.
- 3
Establish the right to win
Articulate why the company is uniquely positioned to attack this goal—which existing components, expertise, money movement, integrations, or customer relationships you can reuse.
Pro tip Reusing components you've already built is a huge source of velocity—the more you attack where you're uniquely positioned, the faster you move.
- 4
Add metrics, initiatives, risks, and long-term outcomes
Define the metrics that measure whether you reached the goal, the initiatives to test the hypothesis, the risks, and the long-term outcomes. This completes the contract.
- 5
Reconcile against product and financial strategy
Take all the pod docs and ensure they align with the longer-term product strategy and the company's financial plan, where each lever of the financial plan has a named owner.
Pro tip Prefer a bi-annual one-pager of company priorities over quarterly OKR planning—the latter consumed a third of the year.
Watch out Quarterly OKRs with per-team quotas turned planning political and slow; the R&D team ended up ignoring the OKRs to just execute the roadmap.
In the wild
Ramp reasoned that a bill is an invoice to the company and an expense is an invoice to the employee—both about processing a liability and moving money. Ramp already had money movement, liability processing, accounting integrations, a risk process, and the paying employees on-platform.
→ That reuse of existing components gave Ramp a genuine right to win in bill payments and increased velocity by leveraging expertise it already had.
Ramp had used quarterly planning that took one month every three months—roughly 33% of time spent planning—with financial quotas per team that became political and annoying.
→ Moved to a bi-annual one-pager of company priorities; planning became much smoother and faster.
Common mistakes
Skipping the right-to-win section
Charles notes it's rare to see teams document why they have the right to win—yet without it, teams chase goals where they have no unique advantage, sacrificing the velocity that comes from reusing existing components and expertise.
Over-planning everything to the same precision
Because accuracy has a cost, spending equal planning effort on low-value timing details as on high-stakes market moments wastes time that should go into velocity—only invest accuracy where it has high value.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders who want empowered pods aligned on direction without heavyweight quarterly OKR machinery.
Not ideal for
Organizations that genuinely need tight cross-functional quarterly coordination and predictable dated commitments.
From the transcript
“strategies about how do we get to our goals and it's not it's not a road map and it's not a vision it's something right…”
“then talk about the initiatives talk about the risks and talk about the long-term outcomes so these are kind of the bullet points of the…”
“we moved from like quarterly very expensive quarterly planning which took one month every three months so basically 33 of the time was planning to…”
“because accuracy has cost make sure that you're only increasing the accuracy of planning for the things that have a high value of that accuracy”
From the episode
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time
Geoff Charles (VP of Product)