Price and package what you sell
Decide what not to build, set the pricing, turn product into a function
Sound familiar?
- Founder-led product has hit its ceiling. The roadmap is whatever the loudest customer asked for last.
- There's a price list, but no pricing logic: no segments, no packages, no idea what each customer would pay.
- Enterprise or regulated buyers expect a discipline the company doesn't have yet: a roadmap they can plan against, release notes, a security and compliance story that survives procurement.
- Nobody has ever said no to a feature.
What I do
Commercial product management, the Pragmatic Institute way, in the order that keeps a company honest: the market problems first, then who has them and what they're worth, then positioning, pricing and packaging, and only then the roadmap. I find the segments, set the packages and the price logic, write the business case for every line on the roadmap, and cut the lines that don't pay. Then I turn product into a function: the roles, the operating model and the people, coached so the discipline outlives me. I've bought enterprise software as a bank, sold it as a vendor and advised the vendors in between, so I know what a regulated buyer's procurement will ask before it asks.
What it has produced
Product strategy from the buyer's side for Puppet, GitHub and Synopsys: roadmaps, customer panels, positioning and the regulatory answers; four and a half years selling and delivering ReadSoft to HBOS, ING, ANZ and AMP. → Selling software into banks
At Black & McDonald, two divisions' service lines mapped into 29 products across 13 product lines, with the portfolio architecture to price and manage them. → About
Scotiabank's product operating model: the product councils and the capability map that decided what the bank would stop building, and hundreds of product managers coached into saying no. → Scotiabank product operating model
SigmaScope, a portfolio platform for advisors, built and priced as a product by a team of AI agents under AITLA. → About
How we'd start
Six weeks: your customers segmented, what each segment buys and would pay, the packages and the price logic, and the roadmap with its cuts marked. Then, if you want it, the function: the first product hires, the operating model and the coaching.