Reverse-Engineering Your Product’s Success
And How We Did It at Vasco
I’ve worked across several product organizations, and one pattern I often see is the urge to prioritize based on feature-level revenue goals or ROI calculations. The logic makes sense—tie effort directly to revenue. But in practice, especially if you're aiming for small, incremental releases, it rarely holds up.
Why is that problematic? Because revenue is influenced by a wide range of factors—changes in sales strategy, shifts in market conditions, seasonality, and more. Additionally, revenue is a lagging indicator. Its movement often reflects the cumulative effect of many changes over time, making it difficult to isolate the impact of any single product release. By the time a feature is shipped and revenue metrics change, it is rarely clear which initiative or factor drove the result.
So, should revenue lift be your north star for prioritization?
Sometimes, yes. But most of the time—especially in early-stage companies—there’s a better way. At Vasco, we’ve implemented a framework that starts with our company’s top-level objective and works backwards to what our product teams can actually influence. In this post, I’ll walk through that framework and show how we’ve applied it on our journey to a Series A.
Define Your Corporate Objective
This is your starting point. Most companies already have a well-defined objective—grow revenue, improve profitability, enter a new market, raise capital, etc. There should also be a measurable target attached.
However, product teams are typically unable to directly influence these high-level objectives. For example, it is unrealistic to expect that launching a single feature will result in an immediate and measurable increase in revenue. In most cases, product work contributes indirectly—by enabling broader initiatives such as entering a new market or driving increased usage over time.
At Vasco, our company-level objective is clear: raise a Series A. However, it isn’t actionable to simply instruct the product team to “build a Series A product.” We need to understand how a Series A level product performs first.
Identify the Performance Indicators That Align with the Objective
The next step is to identify the performance indicators that align with your overarching objective. These could include metrics such as revenue, cost efficiency, unit economics, or product usage, among others. Clearly defining these key targets is essential, as they will shape both the type of product you build and the features you choose to prioritize.
Now, depending on your situation, these performance indicators might come from internal leadership—or from external stakeholders. In our case, because we’re pursuing a Series A, it’s the investors setting the benchmarks.
For Vasco, those key performance indicators (KPIs) include:
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
CAC Payback Period
They also provided values that we have to attain, but I will keep these private.
Again, while we have targets, they’re not things a product team can influence directly. So we go one level deeper.
Find the Product-Controllable Drivers
This is where things get actionable. The real work lies in identifying what product levers influence each KPI—and building around those.
One of my favorite lines from Shang-Chi is when a wise mentor tells the hero’s friend: “If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing.” That’s how I think about performance indicators. If your company’s objective isn’t tied to clear, measurable outcomes, you’ll have no real way to drive progress toward it.
Let me walk you through how we did this at Vasco, a B2B SaaS company.
ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
ARR is an indicator that the product addresses a meaningful problem—one that customers are willing to pay to solve. To accelerate our sales cycle and gather market feedback more quickly, we focused our product investments on saving our target buyers—typically CROs and CEOs—their most limited resource: time, rather than cost. So, we set a fast Time-to-Live target—how quickly a customer can go from purchase to realizing value.
Product Investments: Features that reduce time-to-live—e.g., streamlined onboarding and a CRM clean-up tool.
GRR (Gross Revenue Retention)
GRR reflects whether customers are continuing to use the product over time—essentially, whether it has become indispensable. We reasoned that daily usage is a strong signal of dependency, so we set a target for a high percentage of Daily Active Organizations as a way to measure product stickiness.
Product Investments: Features that solve daily or weekly problems, not quarterly or annual ones. For example, insights that help users hit their monthly growth targets.
NRR (Net Revenue Retention)
NRR is all about expansion—figuring out how to get customers to spend more on your product once they have already bought it. This can take many forms like in-app purchases, additional modules, or more seats. We have a B2B product so our strategy was to go with the latter. We set a target for number of active users per organization, aiming for wide adoption across roles.
Product Investments: Features that serve multiple personas. We prioritized breadth (features for many users) over depth (advanced tools for power users).
CAC Payback Period
This measures how efficiently we can recover our customer acquisition costs. It’s more about go-to-market fit than pure product strategy, but product plays a role too. Customer acquisition costs come from marketing, sales, and onboarding. To reduce those, one can invest more in things like product-led-growth motions or self-serve onboarding. The features, however, have to be inline with buyer expectation. For example, a premium-priced product will likely come with the expectation of premium quality service.
Product Investments: Features aligned with buyer expectations. We invested in demo features to make the sales cycle faster and in making the onboarding experience simpler to reduce the demand on our Customer Success team.
Building a Roadmap for Success
Once your key performance targets are clearly defined and mapped to actionable drivers, you can begin constructing a product roadmap designed to achieve those outcomes. The initiatives you include should directly influence one or more of the drivers you've identified. How you sequence these initiatives depends on your organization's unique context—your constraints, available resources, and stage of maturity.
You might choose to focus first on the driver that is furthest from its target, or prioritize the one that represents the highest strategic value. At Vasco, as an early-stage company, we took an approach aligned with our level of maturity and immediate growth objectives.
When I joined Vasco, we were still in the process of defining our core value proposition—the set of capabilities that would make users return consistently. Our initial focus was on product stickiness, with the goal of minimizing churn. (For any early-stage company, I strongly recommend starting here: solve retention before scaling acquisition.)
We set a target for Daily Active Organizations (DAO) as our proxy for stickiness and tasked product teams with building features that would increase this metric. Using analytics dashboards to track progress, we identified the features that successfully moved DAO numbers and designated them as our core product features.
Once we had a reliable set of core features and were meeting our DAO targets, we shifted focus to reducing time-to-live—the time it takes for a new customer to begin experiencing value. Since speed to value was a key part of our sales pitch, we prioritized investments along the critical path that would get users engaging with core features within five days of signing.
When time-to-live is optimized (this where we’re at on our journey), we’ll begin expanding our reach within customer organizations. Anchored around our core features, we’ll build complementary functionality for adjacent user personas, aiming to increase the number of active users per organization and thereby drive our NRR target.
Finally, we’ll turn our attention to optimizing go-to-market efficiency and improving our CAC Payback Period. This involves ensuring that the product’s complexity, onboarding experience, and pricing were all aligned with our sales motion and target customer expectations.
Each item in our product backlog is tagged with an estimated impact on one or more of these key metrics. We prioritize work based on what step we are on in our strategy and which initiatives are expected to deliver the greatest measurable improvement. Metrics are reviewed weekly—especially before and after each major release—so we can evaluate whether a feature achieved its intended outcome.
Every feature that positively moves the needle is counted as a win. If it doesn't, it’s treated as a learning opportunity. Over time, a product organization that consistently stacks small wins will position itself for the breakthrough outcomes that matter most.
Conclusion
There is no shortage of frameworks for product prioritization, but the most effective ones are grounded in a company’s real business objectives—and translated into outcomes that product teams can actually influence. At Vasco, we found success by starting with our Series A goal and working backward: identifying the key performance indicators that matter to our investors, translating those into measurable drivers, and aligning our roadmap around initiatives that move those drivers meaningfully.
This approach has brought structure and focus to how we build. It ensures that every product decision is not just a response to immediate needs, but a step toward long-term success. It also creates a shared language across product, go-to-market, and leadership teams—a way to evaluate trade-offs and stay aligned as the business evolves.
Ultimately, great products don’t come from chasing revenue; they come from building with intent. By reverse-engineering your roadmap from your business goals, you give your team the clarity and confidence to build what truly matters.