A strategy memo explains a choice: what the company or team will focus on, and what it will stop doing. The readers are a board, a leadership team, or everyone in a small company. They will refer back to it all year when they decide which deal to take or which feature to build, so it has to be short enough to remember.

This template follows Richard Rumelt's kernel of good strategy, from Good Strategy Bad Strategy: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions. It adds a table of options considered, a stop/keep/start list and a Lean Canvas for the chosen customer. The example above is a 2027 strategy for Copperline, a made-up dispatch software company for freight carriers.

What goes in each section

The headline

The choice and what it rules out: "Win the mid-market, not the enterprise." Mistake to avoid: a headline that is a goal ("Become the leader in dispatch software"). A strategy headline must exclude something.

01 · Diagnosis

What is really going on, in numbers and three sentences. Copperline's numbers: $11.4M ARR growing 34%, a 9-month enterprise sales cycle against 27 days in the mid-market, and 3 enterprise deals taking 40% of engineering time. Then the crux: "We sell to everyone. Enterprise deals are large, but slow and full of custom work. Carriers with 20–200 trucks buy fast, renew at 94%, and we under-serve them." Finish with a table of the options you considered and a verdict for each: double down on enterprise (no), mid-market self-serve (go), expand to Europe (later).

Mistake to avoid: a diagnosis that lists every problem. Rumelt's point is to find the one that matters and say why the current approach does not solve it.

02 · Guiding policy

One sentence that rules things out: "every product and sales decision in 2027 serves carriers with 20 to 200 trucks." Then what follows from it: stop custom work for single customers, stop on-premise RFPs, keep the three enterprise accounts as they are, start a self-serve plan, load board integrations and a fuel card partner program. A Lean Canvas fills in the chosen customer, problem, channels, revenue ($45 per truck a month) and unfair advantage (six years of lane pricing data).

Mistake to avoid: a policy so broad that nobody has to stop anything. If the stop list is empty, the policy is a slogan.

03 · Coherent actions

Three to five actions with a quarter each, which together carry out the policy: self-serve plan in Q1, load board integrations in Q2, fuel card partners in Q3, four account executives moved to mid-market. A timeline shows the order, and one goal closes the page: $20M ARR at the end of 2027, with 60% of new revenue from carriers under 200 trucks.

Mistake to avoid: actions that pull in different directions, such as a self-serve plan and a new enterprise sales team. Coherent means each action makes the others work better.

How often and how long

Once a year for a company strategy, revisited each quarter against the actions. One page: four diagnosis numbers, a three-sentence crux, one policy sentence, three to five actions. If you need a strategy document template for a larger organisation, keep this page as its first page and put the analysis behind it. Bring it to the board as the deep dive of a board pre-read. For a new business rather than a choice inside a running one, start with a one page business plan.

How to use this template

• In Obsidian: install the free myone.page plugin, run New page from template and pick Strategy memo.
• With AI: paste your notes, numbers and the options you are weighing into ChatGPT or Claude with the prompt from myone.page/ai, or use the Claude skill. Ask it to argue against your diagnosis before it writes.
• By hand: copy the Markdown of the example.

Where myone.page helps

A strategy memo is drafted with a few people before it goes to many. Shared from the plugin, it is one link: co-founders and directors edit it in the browser without Obsidian, and their changes come back into your note, so there is one version instead of a thread of attachments. The page is end-to-end encrypted, which suits plans you do not want on someone else's server in plain text.