Madhavan Ramanujam: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. We're going to dive into a lot of these things that you've shared in the book and things you've learned. One more context setting question before we get into it all, which part of the org do you believe pricing strategies should sit in? Is it product sales, finance, marketing, something else? Pricing by discipline is a cross-functional discipline. You can't talk pricing in isolation of product, finance, sales, et cetera. There's always touch points. So it's extremely cross-functional. Back in the day, probably a decade ago, I used to say pricing needs to sit in finance, because my view was finance would be the counterbalance to sales, especially if you have sales coming up with pricing in a B2B situation, you can set all the pricing you want, it's human having a human conversation. So how do you put checks and balance in some of that? And my view was pricing should sit in finance and it has to report on ultimately to the CFO. I have, over the last decade, I've been actually advocating that they should sit in the product side. And there was also the genesis of Monetizing Innovation because if we truly believe that we need to build products that are simply products that customers need, they love, they value, they're willing to pay for, it is a product function, because you need to be able to design the product around this information, around what customers need, what they value, and what they're willing to pay for, in short, around the price. If you look at Monetizing Innovation, the subtitle of the book is, How Smart Companies Design Their Products Around the Price. So if you take that viewpoint, then pricing needs to sit in the product function or the founder product and report onto this. This is my strong-held belief, one that probably won't change now. Awesome. That's a great segue to the meat of our conversation. So most of the listeners of this podcast are product builders and people that grow, product managers, founders, people that work on cross-functional product teams. And I was reading a book and I picked five topics that I thought would be especially useful to product leaders to dig into.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.