Entries from May 2010 ↓

10 Must-Read Articles from HBR (PDF)
10 Must-Read Articles from HBR (Source)

Enjoy!

Anyone want to summarize one of the articles for the community?

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

---

Note: The title was lifted from the great Paul Young!
http://twitter.com/ptyoung/statuses/14237728653

We can never have too many pricing lessons. Please read this post from Zendesk – “Introducing New Features, New “Starter” Plan, and New Pricing” and let me know what you think. Where did they go wrong?

I am confused to whether they are raising the prices because the cost of development has gone up or whether they have added value (”we have added new functionality to the service for every week for the last two and a half years”). What I do like (assuming I understand it correctly) – they increase the price per agent as their customers add agents. This seems to lead me to believe they understand that more agents add to the realized value and therefore warrant a higher price point.

I do want to highlight a positive, their CEO responded directly to the thread. Regardless of the quality of his response and the response to his response it will a necessary response to the issue.

Hey guys,

First of all. Yes, we are raising our prices on two of our plans. We now have three plans at three different price points (starting at $9). This is the first time EVER that we have increased pricing. But we have added new functionality to the service for every week for the last two and a half years.

And today we’re launching a lot more functionality for knowledge base and community support. Zendesk has gone from a traditional ticket management system to a complete customer engagement platform, supporting 1-to-1, 1-to-many and many-to-many customer conversations and support interactions. Zendesk is investing heavily in new features and our customers will continue to experience great things with Zendesk.

We will deliver on our promise.

Are we the cheapest show in town? No. But we do think that we have an excellent offering for almost every budget starting at $9 per agent seat. And we do offer to grandfather our existing customers for one additional year at their current price point with all of their current functionality grandfathered indefinitely.

The price per agent has gone up with $10 and $20 on the Regular and Plus+ plans respectively. That’s a 50% increase. Some customers may experience disproportional price hikes due to earlier introductory discounts, and we will look into these accounts on a case-by-case basis.

Let me finally point out, that we have been completely open and transparent about the price changes. We don’t try to sneak it in.

Mikkel Svane, CEO

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

---

Most of the upcoming ProductCamps need help in someway. But here is a direct request from the NYC committee. See a complete list of upcoming events here. Get involved!

It’s time for another Product Camp NYC in September. Need a dedicated organizing committee.

We need about a half dozen COMMITTED PEOPLE to organize PCamp NYC. You need to be located in or around NYC to support this event. Please send email to me at sjhaines (at) sequentlearning.com if you are interested and able.

We need people to

1) GET MONEY from sponsors who are NOT training companies or consultants
2) GET A VENUE
3) GET PEOPLE (Volunteer Speakers) to SUBMIT TOPICS
4) STAY ORGANIZED

This will be a paid for event. People will pay approximately $40.00 for the day (to offset the cost of running the event) so it will offer a slightly different angle over past Pcamps.

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

---

With so much discussion about lean startups, I am wondering what your release cycles look like. Feel free to add comments as to why you you voted one way or another. I am interested in your commentary with respect to the competitive advantage you feel you gain with your release cycle.

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

---

This link is courtesy of Jeff Lash of How To Be A Good Product Manager fame.

Harvard Business Review’s Must-Reads on Strategy (PDF)

Enjoy!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

---

Nothing makes my heart skip a beat like seeing a product management generated price list that includes discounts.

Why? No seriously, ask yourself why?

Volume discounts? Does the value of your product decrease when you increase the number of users? Should you not increase the price of your product? I know what you are thinking, the cost decreases. If you are pricing your product based on cost you are either over-pricing or under-pricing. You should spend a day thinking about this – soon!

Sales discounts? The Sales team is going to be asked for discounts and either comply to close the account (likely) or walk away (unlikely). What happens to your discounts? They get discounted even further. I would sooner sell 25 units at the 10% off requested by Sales than 25 units at 10% off the 15% off I already applied to my pricing model.

Please stop. Your product revenue is not nearly as high as it should be.

You will have to sell your product with discounts, but try not to encourage it by building discount based price lists.

Disclaimer: I realize that some products in some industries work differently, but please think about what you are doing with your price list and the applied discounts before publishing it.

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

---