Business Case for a New Product: The 3-Page PID Template That Forces ExCo Alignment

Most companies cannot write a business case for a new product. Not won’t — cannot. They don’t have the analyst capacity, they don’t have the governance forum, and they don’t have the CPO-level sponsorship to make the exercise count. What they have instead is a slide deck with some numbers on it, presented once, nodded through, and then quietly ignored as the product is built, launched, and eventually wondered-about when nothing happens.

This is the single most expensive habit I see in product organisations. It is also the single biggest reason PE-owned companies outperform their peers on new product introductions — not because they’re smarter, but because they were bought by firms whose entire business model is to do this analysis rigorously, and who bring that rigour with them into portfolio companies.

The corrective is a specific artefact: a tight Project Initiation Document, ideally around three pages, that every ExCo member signs before any engineering capacity is allocated. I used this at Trayport — Europe’s largest and most important energy trading platform — where we grew at a 62% compound annual growth rate over five years. The PID wasn’t the only thing that did the work. But it was the thing that made everything else possible, because it was the first point in the organisation where new product ambition was forced to become new product commitment.

A business case for a new product is a written artefact — typically captured as a Project Initiation Document (PID) of around three pages — that enumerates what problem the product solves, which customer segments benefit and how, the required costs and expected revenues, the functional commitments from every part of the organisation (sales, marketing, engineering, support, legal, finance), and the roles and accountabilities for delivery. Its purpose is not to forecast — forecasts are cheap. Its purpose is to produce alignment: a signed, public statement of what each ExCo member commits to contributing to the product’s success, carried forward into the following year’s budget and tied to bonus compensation so the commitments have teeth.

Sign up (free) to allocate capacity only to products with aligned business cases

Why Most Companies Don’t Do This (and Why PE-Owned Ones Do)

The structural reason is skills and capacity, not intent. Private equity firms employ large numbers of MBA graduates who have learned to perform this kind of analysis during due diligence on prospective investments — sizing markets, modelling TAM and SAM by phase, assessing adjacencies, validating channel economics. It is table stakes for making a PE investment in the first place. When a PE firm buys a portfolio company, that analyst capacity becomes an asset the portfolio company can call on.

Most non-PE-owned companies don’t have analysts sitting around. They have product managers who have never been taught to size a market, engineering leaders whose career path didn’t include writing business cases, and executives who have never been made to demand the appropriate level of rigour from their teams. The result is a new-product process that starts with features, or with branding, or with whatever the most senior stakeholder happens to be excited about that quarter — and skips the underlying work that would tell the organisation whether the bet was worth making at all.

If you are a CPO or a CEO in this position, there are three viable paths:

1. Leverage your PE parent. If you’re PE-owned and don’t have sufficient internal capability, the fund can absolutely provide resource. Ask. They have done this analysis a thousand times for their own investment committees. Using that capability inside the portfolio company is both legitimate and expected.
2. Bring in management consultants. The big strategy firms are genuinely good at this work — market analysis, large-sample customer interviews, unit economics modelling. Expensive, yes. Cheaper than launching a product nobody wants. Worth it on any bet that’s above a threshold of meaningful investment.
3. Upskill internally. Either of the above routes is far more valuable if you treat it as a capability-building exercise rather than a deliverable purchase. Pair your own team with the external analysts. Have them co-author, co-present, co-own. The second PID is the one you write yourselves, using what you learned from the first.

Whichever route you take, one thing is non-negotiable: the CPO must be signed up to drive this from inside the organisation. Consultants and PE analysts can produce beautiful work; without CPO sponsorship the work lands on a shelf. The discipline has to live internally or it doesn’t live at all.

Before Anything Goes on the Roadmap, the Organisation Must Be Aligned

This article sits next to everything else on the RoadmapOne blog for a reason. Roadmaps allocate capacity. The decision about what goes on the roadmap is the decision about what the organisation commits to deliver. And without an aligned business case, that decision is being made by default rather than by design.

The sequence that works:

1. Business case written (PID drafted, typically by the product lead with input from every function)
2. Business case aligned (PID reviewed and signed by the ExCo)
3. Budget commitment made (targets carried into the following year’s budget, with bonus compensation tied where appropriate)
4. Roadmap allocation (capacity allocated to the product against the committed outcomes)
5. Delivery (the work the roadmap enables)

Teams that skip steps 1–3 and jump straight to roadmap allocation are the teams that wonder, six months later, why the launched product isn’t producing results. The answer is usually not a delivery problem. It’s a pre-delivery alignment problem masquerading as a roadmap problem.

This is the connection to the early-stage validation cluster and specifically to product-market fit , problem-solution fit , and the riskiest assumption test . Those frameworks produce evidence. The PID is the governance artefact that turns evidence into organisational commitment. Both matter. Evidence without commitment is theatre; commitment without evidence is hubris.

The Trayport PID: A Tight 3-Page Template

Trayport’s PID was deliberately short. Three pages, maximum. The discipline was in the editing — everything that wasn’t decision-relevant was cut. What remained was the minimum viable artefact for an ExCo to commit against. The template, adapted from what we actually used:

1. Problem Statement (super-clear)

A single paragraph, no jargon, describing exactly what problem the new product solves for a specific customer type. Not an opportunity statement (“there’s a large market for X”); a problem statement (“energy traders currently spend four hours a day reconciling positions across three systems because there is no integrated view”). If the problem cannot be stated clearly enough to fit in one paragraph, the team isn’t ready to write a PID.

2. Benefits by Segment

For each customer segment, a concise articulation of the benefit they receive. Separately, the benefit to Trayport itself — what it does to our business to solve this problem for those customers. Segment-level benefit forces the team to acknowledge that different customers value different things, and that “the market” is a convenient fiction.

3. Points and Issues Requiring Further Discussion

The honest list of things we don’t yet know. Regulatory questions. Integration uncertainties. Pricing model debates. The inclusion of this section is what distinguishes a serious PID from a sales pitch; every bet has open questions, and naming them is a prerequisite to closing them. A PID without open issues is usually a PID that hasn’t been read by anyone sceptical.

4. Missing Skills

Which capabilities does the organisation not currently have that will be needed for this product to succeed? Sales skills for a new segment? Engineering expertise in a new protocol? Support capacity in a new geography? Legal depth in a new regulation? Missing skills are where most new products actually die — not because of what was built, but because of what the organisation couldn’t do alongside the build.

5. Broad Costs and Revenues

This is the commercial analysis section — deliberately broad, not spuriously precise. Year-one revenue estimate, year-three revenue estimate, direct cost of build, ongoing cost of operate. The goal is to get the ExCo arguing about the right order of magnitude, not to produce a spreadsheet that survives first contact with reality. Precision comes later, in the budget commitment phase.

6. Work Stages

Startup, initiation, discovery, commercial analysis — these stages could and did overlap. The point wasn’t a rigid waterfall; the point was a shared vocabulary for where a product was in its journey, so that the ExCo could sensibly ask “what stage is this in?” and get an answer that meant the same thing across functions.

7. Roles and Accountabilities

Named individuals against named responsibilities. Not teams, not functions — specific people. The sales accountability for closing the first three reference customers. The marketing accountability for the launch. The engineering accountability for delivery. The CPO accountability for the overall bet. Without named names this section is aspirational decoration; with named names it is a contract.

8. The One-Page Marketing Flyer (Starting at the End)

This was Trayport’s distinctive addition to the template, and the one most worth stealing. The PID closed with a first-cut one-page marketing flyer — the customer-facing language we would eventually use to sell the product. Headline, value proposition, segment hook, key benefits, call to action.

Writing it at the start of the project forced the team to articulate the product in customer language before building anything. If we couldn’t write the flyer, we didn’t understand the product. If the flyer was generic (“enables faster, better, smarter trading”), we hadn’t differentiated yet. Amazon’s “working backwards” process uses the same logic with a press release; Trayport’s flyer is the European SaaS variant. Either works. What matters is starting at the end.

The Balanced Scorecard and Organisational Function Lenses

A well-written PID forces consideration across two axes that most business cases skip.

The first is the Balanced Scorecard — Kaplan and Norton’s four perspectives of Financial, Customer, Internal Process, and Learning & Growth. A genuine business case accounts for impact across all four: not just “how much revenue” but “what does this do to customer perception”, “what processes need to change internally”, and “what learning does the organisation need to build”. Most business cases overweight the financial lens and under-cover the others, which is why the Missing Skills section of the Trayport template exists — it is the Learning & Growth perspective in disguise.

The second axis is organisational function. A new product touches sales (who sells it?), marketing (who positions it?), engineering (who builds and runs it?), support (who services it?), legal (who contracts and regulates it?), and finance (who prices, models, and reports it?). A PID that hasn’t been reviewed by all six functions is a PID waiting to fail in whichever function was skipped. The clearing-house story below illustrates exactly this pattern.

A Specific Trayport PID That Earned Its Keep

We had been discussing adding links to clearing houses at Trayport for months. No tangible progress. Part of the organisation thought the opportunity was important; part was quietly ignoring it. Engineering had a rough idea it was a good idea but no mandate. Sales didn’t know whether to price it or bundle it. Support hadn’t been asked. The conversation kept circling without converging.

The PID process was the catalyst that broke the deadlock. For the first time, all functional perspectives were brought into a single document. Every function had to enumerate its commitments: sales committed to volume and pricing; marketing committed to segment targeting; engineering committed to an architecture and a date; support committed to capacity; finance committed to budget and revenue recognition. The document forced the ExCo to argue in the same room about the same set of assumptions — which, until that moment, they had been tacitly disagreeing about in different rooms.

The last step was what made it stick: the PID’s commitments were baked into the following year’s budget. Revenue targets sat in the sales plan; cost targets sat in engineering’s; the objective sat in the executive team’s OKRs. When bonuses are tied to budget targets — and at Trayport they were — the PID stops being a document and becomes a contract.

The clearing-house links shipped. They were material to our growth during my tenure. None of that would have happened without the PID.

If You’re Not Actively Supporting, You’re Actively Sabotaging

This is the principle that made the process work. In any sufficiently complex organisation, an ExCo member who disagrees with a new product direction has two options: raise the disagreement openly in the PID review, or absorb the bet through silent non-participation and watch it fail. The second option is enormously attractive because it requires no conflict, no explicit push-back, and no public accountability.

Before we installed the PID process at Trayport, silent non-participation was how most uncomfortable projects died. An ExCo member who didn’t believe in a bet wouldn’t allocate sales effort, wouldn’t approve marketing spend, wouldn’t let their team prioritise the integration, wouldn’t contribute legal review — and six months later the project would quietly be declared a failure. Nobody had killed it. Nobody took responsibility. Everyone agreed it was a shame.

The PID process made this behaviour visible. A signed PID means you are on the hook for your functional commitment; a visibly-unsigned PID means you are publicly withholding support; a signed-then-reneged PID is a contract violation. There are now only three positions: supportive, constructively dissenting, or sabotaging. “Quietly not engaging” is no longer a valid fourth.

If, during a PID review, an ExCo member won’t commit to a number, the correct response is not to proceed anyway with weaker support. The correct response is either to fix whatever is preventing the commitment — resource, skills, scope, timing — or to kill the bet. No commitment, no PID; no PID, no roadmap; no roadmap, no product.

Try RoadmapOne to allocate capacity only against aligned PIDs — free sign-up

The 2026 Reframe: PID Discipline Matters More When Building Is Cheap

AI has collapsed the cost of building a prototype to nearly nothing. The cost of convincing a customer to switch to you, and of sustaining the sales-marketing-support motion that keeps them paying, is unchanged. The AI-era reframe that runs through the product lifecycle and early-stage validation clusters applies here with particular force.

Pre-AI, the cost of building provided an implicit governance filter. You couldn’t afford to build the wrong thing — the economics forced some upstream analysis even when the formal PID process was absent. That filter has gone. In 2026 an organisation can easily ship three or four well-engineered products in a year with no meaningful alignment behind any of them. The cost of doing so is enormous, but it is now a sales-support-attention cost rather than a build cost, which means it lands on the people who couldn’t prevent it.

The PID is the replacement filter. It is the discipline that forces alignment before the cheap build starts, rather than after, when alignment has become harder and the sunk cost fallacy is driving decisions. In 2026 the PID is no longer optional for serious new-product work; it is the load-bearing artefact that keeps the organisation from burning the new attention budget on products nobody committed to.

How a PID Connects to the Rest of Your Product Operating Model

A PID is not a substitute for problem-solution fit work, Mom Test interviews , or riskiest assumption testing . It is the governance wrapper around all of them. The PID tells the organisation why a product is worth pursuing and what each function is committed to delivering; the validation frameworks tell the team whether the specific assumptions underneath the PID hold up under contact with customers.

The relationship to Cagan’s product operating model is direct. Empowered teams are empowered to deliver outcomes. A PID is the organisational-level contract that names the outcome and commits each function to supporting its delivery. Without a PID, an “empowered team” is a feature team with nicer branding, because nobody around them has committed to the conditions the team needs to succeed — sales motion, marketing air cover, support capacity, legal readiness.

Dual-track agile (see the full treatment ) sits inside this governance. The delivery track builds against the PID’s committed outcomes; the discovery track continues to test the PID’s underlying assumptions and, where necessary, feeds back into PID revisions. A healthy product organisation runs one standing PID per active new-product bet, updated as material assumptions change, and carries the updates into the budget cycle at least annually.

The PE / NED Diagnostic for PID Maturity

If you sit on a board and want to assess whether your portfolio company’s new-product process is serious, ask five questions. The answers take ten minutes and tell you everything.

1. Show me the PID for your top three new-product bets. If they don’t exist, the bets are being run by default. If they exist but aren’t current, the bets are decoupled from governance.
2. Which ExCo are accountable for each component? Unsigned PIDs are wish lists.
3. Where does the revenue commitment from each PID appear in the current year’s budget? If it doesn’t, the commitment isn’t real.
4. Are the commitments carried through to individual bonus targets? If not, you’re relying on goodwill; goodwill doesn’t survive a bad quarter.
5. When was the last PID updated, and what changed? Static PIDs are dead PIDs. A live PID captures the organisation’s current best understanding of the bet, updated as evidence accrues.

Five green lights means the process is working. One red light means the process is theatre. Any combination in between tells you exactly where the weakness sits and what to fix.

How RoadmapOne Helps

RoadmapOne is built for the world where PIDs have been signed and roadmap capacity needs to be allocated against them. You can tag an objective to a named PID-backed bet; see squad and sprint allocation against that objective; and the analytics show the board what percentage of capacity is going into each signed bet — a clean audit trail from business case to roadmap to delivery. Tagging by Run / Grow / Transform or Three Horizons adds a layer of portfolio discipline. The roadmap stops being a list of features and becomes what it should be: the operational consequence of the business cases the organisation has committed to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Project Initiation Document (PID)?

A Project Initiation Document is a short written artefact — ideally around three pages — that captures the business case for a new product or project in enough detail for an executive team to commit to it. It covers the problem being solved, benefits by customer segment, open issues, missing skills, costs and revenues, work stages, named roles and accountabilities, and an early cut of customer-facing marketing language. Its purpose is not to forecast but to produce alignment — a signed, public commitment from each ExCo member to their functional contribution. The term originates in PRINCE2 project management but is widely adapted to product and investment contexts.

How long should a business case for a new product be?

Three pages is a good target. Long enough to force consideration of every dimension that matters; short enough that every ExCo member will actually read it. If your business case is longer than five pages, you are probably hiding weak thinking behind verbose detail; if it is a one-page canvas, you are probably missing the functional commitments that make it binding. The Trayport template — eight compact sections, each a paragraph or a short list — is the right shape for most B2B product contexts.

Who should sign off a new product business case?

Every ExCo member whose function is affected by the product’s success — typically the CEO, CPO, CTO, CRO, CMO, CFO, and heads of support and legal. The point of broad sign-off is not ceremony; it is that a signed PID enumerates commitments from each function, and a function that didn’t sign hasn’t committed. The CPO is typically the sponsor and driver, but the CFO signature is the one that carries the revenue commitment into the following year’s budget — and that’s the signature that makes the document stick.

How does the business case relate to the product roadmap?

The business case is the governance artefact upstream of the roadmap. The sequence: business case written → business case aligned and signed → budget commitments made → roadmap capacity allocated → delivery. Teams that skip the first three steps and jump straight to roadmap allocation end up with roadmaps full of features whose contribution to outcomes has never been established. See outcome-based roadmaps for why this sequencing matters.

Do we really need a formal PID for every new product, or is it bureaucracy?

For substantive new-product bets — anything that justifies a dedicated team, a distinct budget line, or a separate ExCo-level commitment — a PID is not bureaucracy, it is the minimum viable governance. For smaller increments to existing products (feature work, improvements, fast follows), a lighter-touch approach is usually right. The test is whether any function not currently enthusiastic about the bet needs to be made to commit resource to it. If yes, you need a PID; without one the uncommitted function will silently sabotage the work. If no — if every function would enthusiastically contribute without a formal instrument — a PID is probably overkill.

What happens if an executive won’t sign the PID?

Treat it as a flashing red light. Either their objections are legitimate and the PID needs redrafting until they are addressed, or the objections are political and need escalating to the CEO. What you must not do is proceed without the signature. A PID signed by everyone except (say) the CRO means the organisation is about to launch a product sales won’t sell — which we tried before installing this process at Trayport and which predictably failed every single time. No signature, no PID; no PID, no roadmap allocation.

How is this different from a Lean Canvas or a Business Model Canvas?

Lean Canvas (Ash Maurya) and Business Model Canvas (Alex Osterwalder) are hypothesis tools — they help a team articulate what they believe is true about a business opportunity so they can test those beliefs. A PID is a commitment tool — it converts the validated beliefs into organisational accountabilities with named owners and budget linkage. In practice, most mature new-product processes use a canvas during problem-solution fit work and graduate to a PID when the bet is ready for cross-functional commitment. The canvas is upstream; the PID is what makes the canvas consequential.

Sign up (free) to tie roadmap allocation to signed PIDs

Conclusion

The business case for a new product is the most under-invested artefact in most product organisations. It is also the single highest-leverage piece of governance any CPO can install. A tight 3-page PID that every ExCo member signs — that enumerates the problem, the benefits, the costs, the risks, the open issues, the missing skills, the named roles, and a first cut of the customer marketing language — is the discipline that turns new-product ambition into organisational commitment.

PE-owned companies are good at this because their parents bring analyst capacity that portfolio companies rarely have internally. Non-PE-owned companies can close the gap by bringing in management consultants, leveraging external analyst capability, and using the engagement as a capability-building exercise for their own teams. Either way, the CPO has to be the sponsor; without internal ownership, the discipline doesn’t survive the first budget cycle.

Most importantly: before anything goes on the roadmap, the organisation must be aligned on the business case. No alignment, no allocation, no ship. Every new-product failure I have witnessed in PE and NED work has the same post-mortem — we built a product that (pick one) sales didn’t want to sell, support wasn’t equipped to service, legal hadn’t reviewed, finance hadn’t budgeted for, or marketing hadn’t positioned. In every case the fix was knowable in advance, and a PID signed at the start would have forced the conversation that was eventually forced by failure.

Plans, as Eisenhower said, are nothing. Planning — the act of writing the plan down and making every stakeholder align on their contribution — is everything.

Baxter image prompt (photorealistic, 4:3): Baxter the wirehaired dachshund sitting at the head of a long, polished dark-wood boardroom table, late-afternoon golden light angling in from tall windows to his left. A single brass fountain pen resting on the table in front of him. The rest of the chairs empty, stretching away into soft focus. Small wire-rimmed reading spectacles perched on his nose. Expression: watchful, patient, weight-of-decision. Cinematic lighting, shallow depth of field, 4:3.