Where Should Vertical SaaS Platforms Invest Next? 

TL;DR 

More Opportunity Has Made Prioritization Harder 

A decade ago, the product roadmap for many vertical SaaS companies was relatively straightforward. Build better software for a specific industry, digitize workflows that were still manual, and gradually expand the functionality customers could manage inside the platform. 

That roadmap has become considerably more complicated as vertical SaaS companies can now invest across AI, automation, embedded payments, embedded finance, data products, customer experience, new workflows, and entirely new revenue streams. Meanwhile, customers expect software to do more, competitors can introduce capabilities faster, and investors continue to expect efficient growth. 

Vertical software is also becoming more central to how businesses operate. McKinsey’s 2025 research found that roughly 90% of U.S. small and midsize enterprises surveyed use an ISV solution for payments or business management, up from 48% in 2022. As software platforms become more embedded in daily operations, the number of adjacent workflows and services they can potentially own continues to expand.  

The number of opportunities has expanded, but the resources available to pursue them haven’t expanded at the same rate. That changes the strategic question. It is no longer enough to ask what a platform could build. Leaders have to determine where the next dollar of investment will create the most value.  

That requires looking beyond the immediate revenue opportunity or the technology attracting the most attention. Some investments produce an obvious near-term return. Others deepen a platform’s role in the customer’s business, create proprietary data, improve the economics of existing products, or establish infrastructure that makes future capabilities possible. 

Those effects can be harder to capture in a traditional feature-by-feature business case. They may also be where some of the greatest long-term value is created. 

Start With the Customer Outcome, Not the Technology 

Technology trends have a way of turning investment conversations backward. 

A new capability emerges and the question quickly becomes, How should we use this? 

For vertical SaaS platforms, a better starting point is the outcome the investment needs to create. Where are customers still experiencing the greatest friction? What prevents them from getting more value from the platform? What problems are they already paying another provider to solve? Where could an investment create a meaningful improvement for the customer or the business? 

Consider a software platform serving businesses that still manage a critical workflow across several disconnected systems. Adding another feature around the edges may expand the product, but taking ownership of that fragmented workflow could fundamentally change the platform’s role in the customer’s operation. The technology becomes a means to an outcome rather than the investment thesis itself. 

This distinction matters particularly as AI reshapes product roadmaps. The presence of an AI opportunity does not necessarily mean there is a valuable customer problem behind it. The same applies to payments, financial services, automation, or any other capability attracting investment. 

A technology earns its place on the roadmap when it improves an outcome that matters. 

Evaluate What the Investment Makes Stronger 

Customer value is the starting point, but it isn’t the entire investment case. 

For a vertical SaaS platform, a strategic investment can create value across several dimensions at once. Evaluating those effects provides a more complete picture of what an investment might contribute to the business. 

Customer Value 

Does the investment meaningfully improve an outcome customers care about? 

That could mean reducing administrative work, improving cash flow, eliminating system switching, increasing visibility, or making a complicated process easier to manage. 

The important distinction is between functionality and value. A feature can add functionality without materially changing the customer’s experience. 

Workflow Ownership 

Does the investment allow the platform to own or orchestrate more of an important customer workflow? 

Workflow ownership matters because the more critical activity that happens inside the platform, the more context the platform has around how customers operate. It can also give the platform an established point from which to introduce additional capabilities without starting a new customer relationship from scratch. 

A platform that manages scheduling, for example, understands one moment in the customer’s business. A platform that connects scheduling with service delivery, invoicing, payments, and customer communication begins to understand the workflow surrounding that moment. 

The investment hasn’t simply added another feature. It has expanded the platform’s role in the customer’s operation and potentially created a foundation for the next capability. 

Economics 

How does the investment change the economics of the platform? 

Some investments create direct revenue. Others improve retention, margin, operational efficiency, or the value of existing products. 

These effects shouldn’t necessarily be treated as interchangeable. A new revenue stream and a meaningful improvement in customer retention create different forms of value. Both belong in the investment discussion. 

The same is true for adjacent services. McKinsey estimates the U.S. market for SME financial management services at approximately $120 billion, as software platforms expand beyond core operational tools into capabilities such as accounts payable and receivable automation, lending, payroll, tax management, and financial reporting.  

That doesn’t mean every platform should pursue every adjacent revenue opportunity. It demonstrates why investment decisions increasingly require leaders to consider the broader economics surrounding the core software product. 

Data Advantage 

What does the platform learn by owning the capability? 

Every additional workflow can create new context about customer behavior, transactions, operations, or outcomes. In isolation, that data may have limited value. Connected with information the platform already owns, it can become considerably more useful. 

That can improve reporting today while creating the foundation for better automation, benchmarking, recommendations, or intelligent products later. 

Strategic Optionality 

Perhaps the least immediate question is also one of the most important: What becomes possible if we make this investment? An investment that solves today’s problem while creating the infrastructure for several future capabilities has a different strategic value than one that reaches the end of its usefulness once implemented. 

CUSTOMER VALUE  Solve a meaningful problem  ↓

WORKFLOW OWNERSHIP  Bring more critical activity into the platform  ↓

DATA ADVANTAGE  Create richer operational and transactional context  ↓

AUTOMATION + NEW CAPABILITIES  Use that context to improve and expand the product  ↓

STRONGER ECONOMICS  Increase revenue, retention, efficiency or margin  ↓

STRATEGIC OPTIONALITY  Create more valuable opportunities for the next investment

↻ Each new capability can strengthen the value of what came before.

The Strongest Investments Compound 

Some investments solve one problem. Others change the economics or usefulness of the capabilities around them. Consider a hypothetical vertical SaaS platform that begins by managing scheduling for a service-based business. Scheduling gives the platform visibility into when customer activity is expected to occur. 

Adding invoicing allows the platform to begin connecting completed work with what the customer is owed, while embedded payments introduce visibility into when money actually moves. Connect those capabilities and automated reconciliation becomes possible. Operational and transaction data can begin informing cash-flow insights, forecasting, benchmarking, or intelligent recommendations, while AI can eventually automate parts of those workflows because the platform has accumulated enough context to understand them. 

The strategic value of each investment is no longer isolated. Payments can generate revenue while making reconciliation more useful. Transaction data becomes more valuable because it can be connected to invoices and completed work, while AI becomes more useful because it has richer operational and financial context to work from.  

Each capability increases the potential value of another, and creates a different way to think about ROI. Instead of evaluating every investment as an isolated business case, leaders can also ask whether an investment strengthens the capabilities surrounding it. 

A capability that looks modest on its own may become strategically important if it creates the foundation for several subsequent investments. And this is where sequence of investment decisions begins to matter. 

Two companies could ultimately invest in the same five capabilities and create very different results depending on the order in which they build them. Data becomes more useful when the platform owns the workflows that generate it. Automation becomes more valuable when there is enough context to automate intelligently. New monetization opportunities become more attractive when customers already rely on the platform for the underlying activity. 

The roadmap isn’t simply a collection of priorities. It is a sequence of investments that can either reinforce one another or remain disconnected. 

Where AI and Payments Fit 

AI and embedded payments illustrate why this framework matters. 

Both are receiving significant attention across vertical SaaS, but neither should automatically move to the top of an investment roadmap simply because it represents an important industry shift. 

AI can create operational leverage, but its value depends on the problem it solves and the context the platform has to apply it effectively. Like any other capability, AI should earn investment based on the value it can create rather than the attention it is receiving. 

Payments can play a similarly foundational role, and the economic opportunity is already significant. Payment processing revenue through software platforms in the U.S. grew approximately 20% annually over the five years through 2025, reaching a projected $16 billion from $6.5 billion in 2020, according to McKinsey. Its research also found the ISV channel growing about three times as fast as traditional channels.  

But the strategic value of embedded payments extends beyond payments revenue. Payments connect the platform to a critical moment in the customer workflow: when money moves. That can deepen workflow ownership and introduce transaction data that becomes more useful when connected with the operational data already inside the platform. 

For a platform that already understands what was scheduled, what service was delivered, what was invoiced, and what was owed, understanding when and how payment occurred creates another layer of context. 

The strategic question, then, isn’t whether AI or payments is inherently a good investment. It is whether the capability reinforces the system the platform is building. 

When workflow, data, automation, and monetization begin strengthening one another, individual investments stop behaving like isolated features and start behaving like infrastructure. 

More Features Don’t Necessarily Create More Value 

There is a natural temptation to equate platform expansion with platform value, but the two are not synonymous. Every new capability introduces a cost. Engineering resources have to support it, sales teams have to explain it, customer teams have to implement and troubleshoot it, and product teams have to maintain it alongside everything else competing for attention. 

A feature that creates little customer value can therefore produce negative strategic leverage: more complexity without meaningfully strengthening the platform. 

This is particularly important for vertical SaaS businesses because specialization is part of their advantage. Their value comes from understanding the workflows, economics, and operational realities of a particular market more deeply than a horizontal platform can. 

Expansion should reinforce that advantage rather than dilute it. Instead of asking how much more functionality can fit inside the product, leaders can ask a more useful question: Does this investment make the platform more important to how the customer runs their business? That standard creates a considerably higher bar for the roadmap. 

Five Questions Before the Next Investment 

Investment decisions will always involve assumptions. A framework won’t eliminate uncertainty, but it can make the assumptions behind those decisions more explicit. 

Before committing significant resources, leadership teams should be able to answer five questions: 

The fifth question is easy to overlook because its return may not appear in the initial business case, but it may also be the question that separates a useful feature from a strategic platform investment. 

Build the Roadmap Backward From the Platform You Want to Become 

Vertical SaaS leaders don’t have a shortage of opportunities. The challenge is deciding which opportunities deserve investment now, which should come later, and which don’t strengthen the platform enough to pursue at all. 

The strongest roadmaps won’t necessarily contain the most ambitious collection of features. They’ll prioritize investments that solve meaningful customer problems while strengthening the capabilities around them. 

Because the question isn’t simply, “Where should we invest next?” 

It is, “What should we invest in next that will make everything we’re building more valuable?” 

Frequently Asked Questions  

Q. How should vertical SaaS platforms decide where to invest next? 

A. Start with the customer or business outcome, not the technology itself. The strongest investments solve a meaningful problem while also strengthening other parts of the platform, such as workflow ownership, economics, data, or future capabilities. 

Q. What should vertical SaaS leaders consider when evaluating a new investment? 

A. A useful framework is to evaluate five areas: customer value, workflow ownership, economics, data advantage, and strategic optionality.  Together, these help leaders look beyond immediate revenue or added functionality to understand the broader value an investment could create. 

Q. What makes a technology investment strategic rather than just another feature? 

A. A strategic investment does more than add functionality. It can deepen the platform’s role in an important customer workflow, create useful data, improve economics, or establish capabilities that make future investments more valuable. 

Q. Why does the sequence of platform investments matter? 

A. Capabilities can become more valuable when they build on one another. For example, connecting scheduling, invoicing, payments, transaction data, and automation can create opportunities that wouldn’t exist if each capability were evaluated or developed in isolation. The order of investment can therefore influence the value a platform is able to create over time. 

Q. Should vertical SaaS platforms prioritize AI? 

A. AI should be evaluated against the same standard as any other investment: what meaningful problem will it solve? Its value can increase when the platform already has the workflow context and data needed to apply AI to meaningful decisions, automation, and repetitive work. 

Q. Does adding more features make a vertical SaaS platform more valuable? 

A. Not necessarily. Every new capability introduces engineering, sales, implementation, support, and maintenance costs. An investment should strengthen the platform’s value to the customer rather than simply expand the amount of functionality it offers.