Pricing is a product decision, so stop leaving it to finance
Orbital's prices used to be set in a spreadsheet once a year. Grace Liu on bringing pricing into the product team, and how a new model changed what customers used and what got built.
- Thursday 10 June
- Day 2
- 16:30–17:10
- 40 minutes
- Studio
- First floor, river side
- Talk
- Intermediate
At most software companies pricing is decided once a year, by finance and sales, in a spreadsheet the product team never sees. Product managers then spend the year wondering why customers use features in strange ways, why some deals take months, and why their best work does not move revenue.
At Orbital, Grace brought pricing into the product team. Over eighteen months the company moved from per-seat prices to pricing by delivery volume, with packages built around what logistics companies actually do rather than which features engineering happened to ship. Grace explains the research behind it, the experiments run with new customers, how existing customers were moved across, and the internal argument over one feature that nearly derailed the whole thing.
The result changed more than revenue. It changed which features got used, which got built, and how sales and product talk to each other.
What you will take away
- How to research willingness to pay without a dedicated pricing team
- A process for testing new pricing on new customers before changing it for everyone
- How to move existing customers to a new model without losing their trust
