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

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 ...Read More

Oh man, the pricing question! This is probably one of the biggest sources of confusion between PMs and PMMs. I've literally seen spreadsheet battles over who gets final say on pricing decisions. The best teams I've seen treat pricing as a joint strategic exercise where PMM is the chief advisor and PM is the final decision maker. Think of it like PMM is the CFO and PM is the CEO when it comes to pricing - you need both perspectives to get it right. PM Ownership of Pricing: Sets the actual price p ...Read More

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 release ...Read More

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) Featu ...Read More

I’ve generally seen product marketing own pricing in an organization. They partner with research or even an outside firm to understand the competitive landscape, run surveys like the Van Westendorp and shopping cart exercise to get at psychological thresholds and optimal pricing, and do qualitative interviews to understand how the price plus suite of features/offerings actually land with both users and prospects.  That said, pricing is rarely straightforward or in the purview of just one team. I ...Read More