Who owns pricing? Product Marketing or Product Management? If both, how do you divide the responsibilities?

Great question with the most votes. In my experience, Product Marketing owns a large percentage of the market analysis, pricing and packaging effort. At VMware, Product Marketing works hand in hand with Product Management, executive staff, finance and sales to carve out pricing for new and incremental offerings. We split pricing related responsibilities in the following way. Product Marketing: Customer & market intelligence i.e. customer segmentation, addressable market, competitve insights ...Read More

The answer really varies by company - I have seen instances of Product Marketing, Product Management, Finance, Biz Ops, and Sales Strategy teams own pricing. In an ideal world, the team that's both tasked with understand your products/market/customers and works closely w/ Sales is the best place to lead pricing initiatives. In most instances, I'd argue that this is Product Marketing. Product Management are important stakeholders in the process (along with teams like Sales and Finance) but since ...Read More

Pricing & Packaging was owned by Product Marketing when I was at Drift. It's also been like that at my other past companies (Enernoc, athenahealth and Toast). With that said, it's a highly collaborative role - including partnership with sales, product, finance, operations and customer success. And of course, your executive leadership team. Product Marketing owns the function - we are the driver of the pricing & packaging process, hold the pricing committees accountable, hold the meetings ...Read More

Both - pricing is a team effort. PMM and PM should be in lock-step when building, executing, and optimizing a pricing strategy. Some considerations on critical phases of pricing strategy development:  Competitive differentiation: Both teams should proactively build a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape (e.g., how competitors price, what pricing/packaging models they offer, what makes their offering different or valuable, etc.) and form a joint POV on what makes the most sens ...Read More

You'll see different scenarios in different companies based on industry, size, skills, or company history. At PayFit, Product Marketing owns the topic, but we work very closely with product and biz ops. Product Marketing owns the project, but it's typically a cross-functional decision in the end. Finance, Product, Biz Ops, and Sales generally are substantial stakeholders in the process. Product marketing will review current sales performance, customer repartition by pricing plans, discount, etc. ...Read More