Every tech pricer has been handed an impossible task at least once. The product is built, launch is in six weeks, and the product team just asked how we should price it.
I joke that products like this are a 600-gallon vat of mayonnaise. Try pricing that for a family of four.
You can’t. The mayonnaise is fine. The size of the vat was decided months ago, by people who never asked how a family buys mayonnaise.
Software does this all the time. The product ships with one chunky license, no way to sell it by team or by use, and no meter for the thing customers value. By the time pricing sees it, the code itself has eliminated most of the pricing options.
If you run product, bring pricing in while the idea is still on the whiteboard. Product teams think hard about how customers will use a product. They don’t think enough about how customers will buy it. Agree on the metrics together before they get built into the code.
If you run pricing, you don’t need a complete pricing strategy that early. You need answers to two questions. How does value scale as a customer uses more? And how do needs differ across the segments you plan to sell to?
Those answers shape the two things that are expensive to change later, licensing and instrumentation. Think of Lego bricks. Licensing decides the shapes of the bricks, so you can build the package each segment needs. Instrumentation lets you count the bricks you sell.
Every roadmap review asks whether the product can solve the customer’s problem. Ask the commercial questions in the same meeting. Can we sell it, and can they buy it?
If the deal can’t close, you never get the chance to solve the problem.
