A ProfitWell veteran noticed that companies with centralized pricing decisions consistently failed to implement new strategies. The problem wasn't the strategy itself, but that teams lacked a clear picture of their existing monetization engine: the technology, people, and processes already in place. Without understanding the current state, even great pricing ideas never launch.
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ProfitWell's famous in the world of monetization and, you know, ProfitWell, Price Intelligently, Paddle. Can you, can you talk a little bit about kind of what stands out to you as the key lesson or lessons you learned at that experience?
Yeah, absolutely. During my time at ProfitWell, I had the opportunity to work across a very interesting portfolio of clients, um, clients that spanned B2B and B2C, clients that were changing their strategies, really doubling down on what their current strategies were, were extremely confused about what to do and why they hadn't touched their pricing in so long. It really, you know, it was across the board on why people came to ProfitWell to help them. And across all of these different teams that I worked with, the biggest thing that stood out to me was that the teams that had a single center of control when it came to pricing and packaging, whether that was within product marketing or at the executive level were more likely to not implement or move forward with any of the recommendations that we ended up coming with together. And I asked myself, well, why is it that you can't take these recommendations that we vetted in the market that show so much potential that you're so excited about and actually implement them within your product? What it came down to was that single center of control was actually the antithesis of greatness within that company and the ability to monetize more effectively because it didn't allow for complete awareness of how the product was actually built to continue to monetize. So, to break that down even further, right, like what I saw in those single centers of control is that those people oftentimes had a very poor understanding of what the true current state was of their monetization engine, of the operations that surrounded what makes monetization so important and effective within a company. And we spent so much time going through, well, what does the market want? How do you guys think about this? What is your business strategy? Only to get to our current state doesn't support this, or we need to evolve our tech stack to move forward with this. So the biggest lesson that I learned and what was most interesting, which is what took me down this path of really going into being a tactical operator within the monetization space, was if you don't have a strong grasp on your current state and you don't understand where your opportunity areas are within your current state or what it takes to evolve the current state of technology, of people, of processes, you can have the greatest strategy in the world built out and thought out, but it's not going to work because your single center of control is keeping people away from contributing to something that requires close collaboration and thought leadership across the board. And that was a profound insight because it makes you think about the way in which businesses are organized.
