Product playbook: S-1 teardowns

Most product managers live in the weeds. They obsess over user stories, sprint planning, and feature prioritization. The best PMs I know are able to think like the leadership team. They understand market dynamics, customer acquisition costs, and how their product fits into the broader business strategy.

The gap between these two types of PMs is widening. As AI automates more tactical PM work, the role is becoming fundamentally more strategic. Yet most PMs still lack the business acumen to operate at this level.

Here’s what I’ve found has helped me and my teams level up: reading S-1 filings.

Why S-1s are strategic gold

An S-1 is the registration statement companies file before going public. Think of it as the ultimate business strategy document. The CEO and CFO must explain their entire business model, market opportunity, competitive landscape, and growth strategy to sophisticated investors who will lose millions if they get it wrong.

The result? A brutally honest assessment of how a business actually works.

In 200+ pages, you’ll learn how companies acquire customers, where their revenue comes from, what keeps executives awake at night, and how they think about the future. You’ll see financial statements broken down in ways that reveal the unit economics behind every strategic decision.

Most importantly, you’ll start thinking about your own product through the lens of business fundamentals rather than just user experience.

Your S-1 reading strategy

Skip the legal boilerplate and focus on these sections:

• Business Overview How does the company describe itself? What’s their core value proposition and market positioning?
• Risk Factors: This is where companies reveal their real concerns. Competitive threats, market dependencies, regulatory challenges. Pure strategic intelligence.
• Management’s Discussion and Analysis (MD&A): The executive team explains their numbers, growth drivers, and strategic priorities in plain English.
• Financial Statements: Learn to read a P&L like a board member. Revenue composition, gross margins, customer acquisition costs, and unit economics.

Start with these B2B SaaS companies that tell compelling strategic stories:

• Snowflake (2020): Their S-1 revealed how they built a consumption-based model that scaled with customer success. Instead of seat-based pricing, they charged for actual data processing, aligning their revenue directly with customer value. Their gross margins exceeded 70% while growing 174% year-over-year.
• Atlassian (2015): The anti-sales company that proved you could build a billion-dollar business without a traditional sales team. Their F-1 (foreign companies file F-1s, not S-1s, but the contents are the same) showed how they used product-led growth and viral adoption within development teams to achieve 80%+ gross margins with minimal customer acquisition costs.
• Datadog (2019): Demonstrated the power of land-and-expand in observability. Started with infrastructure monitoring, then expanded into APM, logs, and security. Their S-1 showed how net revenue retention above 130% created a compounding growth engine.
• Zoom (2019): Filed right before becoming a household name, their S-1 revealed the unit economics behind viral growth. Net promoter scores above 70, gross margins near 80%, and a freemium model that converted enterprise customers through bottom-up adoption.
• Monday.com (2021): Showed how visual project management could capture both SMB and enterprise markets. Their cohort analysis revealed how customers expanded usage over time, with average revenue per user growing consistently as teams adopted more workflows.

You’ll begin recognizing patterns in how successful businesses think about growth, competition, and market opportunity.

The exercise that changes everything

After reading a few S-1s, write your company’s hypothetical filing. Imagine you’re going public in three years.

Think of this like championship teams that practice cutting down the nets. They visualize success to make it tangible and align everyone on what they’re building toward. Your hypothetical S-1 serves the same purpose for product strategy.

How would you describe your market opportunity? What are your competitive advantages? What risks would you highlight? How do you explain your product strategy to analysts who’ve never used your software?

This exercise forces you to think beyond features and user feedback. You start considering total addressable market, customer lifetime value, and how your roadmap connects to revenue growth.

Share your draft with your Head of Product. The conversation alone will elevate how you think about strategy.

AI-powered analysis

Reading S-1s is time-intensive, but AI can help you extract key insights faster. Go to the SEC website and find the company you’re interested in, then try this prompt:

“Analyze this S-1 filing and provide: 1) The company’s core business model and revenue streams, 2) Their main competitive advantages and differentiators, 3) Top 5 risk factors and strategic concerns, 4) Key financial metrics and unit economics, 5) Their growth strategy and market opportunity thesis. Focus on insights that would be valuable for a product manager in a similar space.”

This approach lets you digest multiple filings quickly while still developing your business intuition.

The strategic advantage

PMs who understand business fundamentals make better product decisions. They prioritize features that impact key metrics. They communicate with executives in their language. They build products that align with company strategy rather than just user preferences.

As AI handles more execution work, this business acumen becomes your sustainable competitive advantage. Start with one S-1 this week. Read it like you’re considering an investment. Ask yourself what you’d want to know as an investor, then apply that same rigor to your own product strategy.