Shay Willard tells product managers to own pricing instead of handing it off to marketing or executives. Start early, research what customers will actually pay, and study how competitors tier their products. PMs who understand pricing build products that generate real revenue.
when product managers come to you and they're interested in pricing and monetization?
Yeah.
What would you advise them to think about or go do to master pricing and packaging as a discipline?
I would say don't be afraid of it. I've spoken to a lot of, you know, even myself when I was younger, younger PMs now who don't necessarily want to get involved or think it's their responsibility or that's on marketing or the exec team to figure out what we price it as. And I think that's the completely wrong mindset to go about. I think you as the product manager want to communicate the value of the product and understand your customers and what they're willing to pay for it and be willing to ask what they're willing to pay for it. And so I think the biggest thing you can do as a PM is think about pricing early. Like don't be afraid of it. Don't shy away from it. Don't think it's somebody else's responsibility to figure out a price for something. You figure it out and you do that by some of the examples I mentioned, whether that's doing market research and looking at some of your competitors and how they price and package and do they do tiers? Do they do scalar model? Do they do something else? Do they do usage-based? And then do the primary research too, like get in front of your customers and figure out, hey, this is what we're building. Show them the demo, show them the prototype. If it's a new product, great. If it is existing product, fine too. And see like, does it— would you be willing to pay more for this? Would you be willing to pay X amount for this? Would you be willing to pay for this at all? Right.
To me, there's a subtext what you're saying, which is if you want to go be in product, you should want to build products that make money.
Yeah, exactly.
And you should, and you should hold yourself accountable to delivering enterprise value by shipping products that drive the commercial interests of the business.
Yes.
And you can't do that unless you really deeply care about pricing and packaging.
