Phased Plan to Extend an Invoice Management Product into Purchase Requisitions

You own an existing invoice management system, the tool a finance team uses to receive, approve and pay vendor invoices. Lay out a roadmap for bringing purchase requests into it, either by building them into the product or by connecting it to the tools where customers raise them today. ```hint Start where the invoice comes from Think about what goes wrong for finance teams when an invoice shows up with no approved request behind it, and which pieces the product already has (approval routing, vendor records, account coding) that a request flow could reuse. That tells you what the first phase must prove. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Who uses the invoice system today: finance teams at small and mid-size companies with no procurement tool, or larger companies whose ERP already issues purchase orders? - Does "integrating" mean building a native request flow, connecting to procurement tools and ERPs customers already run, or a mix of both? - What can be reused from the current product, such as approval workflows, the vendor list, budgets or general-ledger coding? - Is the aim to win new customers, keep existing ones, or sell purchase requests as a paid add-on? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The problems purchase requests solve for an invoice product's customers (spend committed without approval, invoices nobody can trace, budget surprises) and who feels each one. - A reasoned build-versus-integrate choice, and how requests, purchase orders and invoices link in the data model. - A phased roadmap ordered by dependencies, with what each phase ships, what it unlocks and what it must prove before the next one starts. - Success metrics for each phase, with guardrails for the friction a request step adds for employees outside finance. - Risks such as low requester adoption, clashes with an ERP that is the system of record, and drifting into a full procurement suite. ### Follow-up Questions - A large customer already raises purchase orders in their ERP. How does your roadmap serve them without making them enter everything twice? - After launch, employees say the request step slows down small purchases. What would you change? - How would you price the capability: included in the current plan, sold as an add-on, or charged per requester?