Series
Building a Pricing Platform: The Series
Thirteen posts on building and evolving a revenue-critical pricing platform — from Strangler Fig migration through rule engines, experimentation, segmentation, models, simulation, and the lifecycle that holds it all together.
13 posts in total
Posts in this series, in order
Before Building a Pricing Platform, We Had to Stop Replacing and Start Growing
Why our first move toward a new pricing platform was understanding the present, not replacing it.
Fees, Markups, and the Illusion of Simple Pricing
Why changing a price is rarely just changing a number.
Pricing Is a Team Sport
Pricing lives in the intersection of product, analytics, engineering, and business.
The Hidden Cost of Hardcoded Pricing Rules
Hardcoded rules were never the real problem. They were a symptom.
Building Rule Engines for Business Agility
Technologies change. Business capabilities survive much longer.
Every Pricing Rule Is a Hypothesis
A pricing rule isn't a decision. It's a prediction. And predictions can be wrong.
The Average Customer Does Not Exist
The average customer doesn't exist. Optimising for one is optimising for nobody.
Understanding Price Sensitivity
Price sensitivity isn't a label. It's a relationship.
Pricing Is a Tradeoff
Pricing isn't the art of finding the highest price. It's the discipline of choosing which tradeoffs matter.
From Price Sensitivity to Pricing Models
A model isn't smarter than the learning process that produced it. It just makes that learning easier to apply repeatedly.
Every Model Is a Product Decision
A pricing model is never neutral. Whatever it optimises for is a product decision dressed up as mathematics.
Simulating the Future
Simulation doesn't reduce uncertainty. It moves uncertainty somewhere the team can argue about it before customers do.
The Lifecycle of a Pricing Rule
A pricing platform isn't a collection of rules. It's the institutional memory of every decision the business has ever doubled down on or backed away from.