Talking finance: Should software developers help price the product they build?

Every IT professional knows the absolute dream: to be invited to yet another meeting.

But a pricing meeting isn’t your typical corporate get-together; it comes once the company is ready to release a product or service that the team has spent months, maybe even years, building. Those who built the product must now help determine its value…and its price.

Some executives would prefer if IT professionals weren’t in the room for those kinds of conversations.

“Whoever is working in a company, I wouldn’t worry about [ pricing]. I hate to say it this way, but it’s not in their pay grade,” Arjun Pillai, the co-founder and CEO of AI platform Docket, said. “It’s just too much variable for them to worry about. The people who are heading the company, those are the people who should worry about it.”

But other experts, like Guy Marion, chief marketing officer at Chargebee, and Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, believe that assigning value to a product is a cross-company exercise.

“Pricing and packaging is a multi-disciplinary effort,” Foster said. “You’re trying to figure out what is the best way to deliver value to customers…I tend to find that you want anyone who has a good point of view on those things at the table.”

The room where it happens. Historically, a company’s finance teams and CFO have been widely seen as responsible for determining pricing for a new product or service.

But as technology such as AI becomes more complex, according to Marion, there’s a rising desire within businesses to involve technical staff and others in pricing meetings.

“We’re seeing the rise of the empowered RevOps, the empowered CIO, the empowered IT leader who thinks about pricing as a product,” Marion said. “When you think about pricing as a product, you think very differently. You need to build in agility. You need to have the ability to automate everything to begin with.”

Against the backdrop of these changes, Marion said Chargebee recently created an internal SVP of corporate IT role, which oversees the interplay between finance, billing, CRM, taxation, and other software.

But, do we have to? While Chargebee wants IT in the room to the very end of a release cycle, Foster said that sometimes those conversations are above an IT professional’s pay grade.

In deciding who should be at the table for a pricing conversation, Foster said that he likes to put aside titles and instead focus on skills and tasks required. If there isn’t an understanding of the cost to deliver a product, “you’re going to end up losing money per every transaction you have, and that’s a problem,” he said.

“You want your folks in your organization to have good instincts on: What are the customer problems? How does the customer value these things?…Generally, that requires a well-rounded perspective,” Foster said.

If IT is bringing perspectives that the company needs, they should “unequivocally have a seat at the table,” he said.