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Who owns pricing - product management or product marketing? If product management, then what is product marketing's role?

3 Answers
Becky Trevino
Becky Trevino
Snow Software Executive Vice President ProductsMarch 1

There is no one-size-fits-all response to this answer. At Snow Software, where I lead Product Marketing and Operations, pricing falls under me. Prior to my arrival, pricing fell under Product Management. I had an interest in owning pricing and the Product Management lead did not, so it was a quite simple decision. We recently hired a Pricing Manager who works closely with Sales Operations and partners with PM and PMM on pricing strategy.

When Product Management owns pricing, I would see the role of the PMM as providing feedback on pricing via Win-Loss Analysis. Pricing is one of the 4Ps of Marketing and can be a very important lever in your GTM. It is wise to have a pulse on Average Deal Size, Average Discount, and whether your price is causing you to win/lose deals. Another area where PMM can partner on Pricing if it does not fall under PMM is packaging. Based on your research into win-loss, you may be able to see patterns where a different bundle or package is better suited to solving the customer problem.

Note: Many large organizations have specialized pricing departments that report into a Head of Pricing that reports into Finance, Market Intelligence, or another group. In this case, neither PM nor PMM own the function.

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Lauren Craigie
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product MarketingApril 27

I've always felt like this question felt a bit like, "who owns features, engineering or product?" Both teams are responsible for different points in the lifecycle. 

In my ideal version of the world, pricing overhauls (a new pricing strategy like moving from seats to usage), is managed by a project management team. It's a lot of chasing folks for research, input, and decisions. 

PMM should play the role of:

  • Understanding market comparisons (how complementary and competitive solutions price)
  • Feature value ranking—to inform what value customers derive from the product in order to inform the levers on which its priced
  • Packaging—what features are most valuable to whom, and how should they be grouped
  • Customer interviews—to understand what might cause confusion during pricing roll-out
  • Themeing/writing the press release (how does this pricing help customers, and help our business achieve our goals)
  • Sales tools and enablement—calculators and rules for pricing, as well as how to communicate changes

PM + FInance should play the role of: 

  • In-product changes that need to occur to facilitate new pricing (especially in a self-serve world)
  • Setting price point based on business goals, understanding expected delta for customers migrating

388 Views
Sonia Moaiery
Sonia Moaiery
Skilljar Director of Product MarketingOctober 18

At one point pricing and packaging sat in the PMM team at Intercom but as pricing and packaging became more complex for us with many, many plans, we actually now have a dedicated pricing and packaging team that PMM works closely with when it comes to new product releases to determine if they fit within existing plans or need to be an add-on, and which plans access given features. 

The P&P team tends to own P&P overall and for much bigger product releases, and for smaller tier 2/3 releases, PMM will still drive for those. Product will have input into these conversations but they're not the final decision makers.

We have a "pricing steering committe" the approves all big pricing changes and this includes members of our exec team.

862 Views
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