Progress ran each product as a separate site with different lead flows, making cross-selling nearly impossible. Moving to multi-product requires standardizing plans, enforcing entitlements across products, and normalizing SKUs, but customers have such individualized configurations that the team calls them "cohorts of one."
in a, in a multi-product world, pricing and packaging becomes more complex, and a lot of that complexity often falls on product and engineering to figure out how to support, how we're going to build for this. Um, walk us through maybe just a little bit of the journey that Progress has been on.
Yeah, I mean, even before I was there, I think the original— because I, I've know, I've been very familiar with the company for a long time— the original products, each product had its own website. Like, there wasn't even like necessarily like a way that was all tied together. And then that manifested itself all the way into the product. So like the leads were separate, then the products were separate. Um, like you would kind of jump between various products one at a time, like the whole UI would kind of, um, shift. So the biggest thing that we've been focused on is we realized by having the multi-products be too separate, it was really hard to cross-sell. Um, we were actually getting amazing adoption across many of our products., but that was also creating a poor user experience, which is how I got kind of more involved there. I work very closely with the commercial team on this. Like, I definitely am more on the implementation side. The commercial team has been selling very successfully for several years at Pago. So we're kind of taking the learnings of what's been kind of these bespoke, more enterprise deals over the years, um, trying to better understand by comparing data that we're getting in post-hoc and some of the feature usage, like what are the value drivers and kind of like informal cohorts in the app to see like how can we break some of this out. And then I'm just kind of obsessing over it from the UX side of like, how is someone create the account? What does that sales motion look like? And then how do we enforce those entitlements once we have them kind of on a plan and upgraded? When you start that way where everything's bespoke, there is not like a great way to enforce entitlements. Like everything, like, like currently we enforce through like some things are in like a metadata on a company or a user. Some things are now feature flags. I think we have a third method. And it's hard to now standardize all that because you have all your customers that are now using the product in a lot of different ways. It's hard to even design a migration to a more formalized system because we don't, it's like, there's not even a baseline for where everyone is. It's almost individual. You kind of have to try to go look at it and like, are we going to round up and down or like. What's the plan there? I feel like we definitely made things harder on ourselves than if we would have approached this potentially at an earlier stage in the company.
So it's like it's hard to normalize and rationalize SKUs effectively and you end up with like a bunch of cohorts of one, for lack of a better term.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's, it just, it's almost hard to explain it. And then it's like also hard for folks to track internally. Like, how do you even know what's the source of truth for what all these customers are on? That kind of thing. So we have a great path forward. We're really excited about it, but it's one of those things that's like, if someone's just starting today, I would think about this sooner rather than later because otherwise it's going to be a lot harder with a lot more people involved down the line to try to straighten it out.
