While a Product Management Canvas is an internal-facing tool used to describe or envision your product, a Pricing Table is an excellent external-facing tool to describe or imagine your product. Let us explore why it is so and along the way list some key things to talk about in a pricing table.
A Way to Describe Your Product
What if you had to make a single-page product note or a pitch for your product? As an ideator and/or as a product manager, what would you include in the product note to describe your product? In other words, what minimal information describes a product crisply?
Consider these:
- Key features that make your product useful and valuable
- Additional features that allow someone to use your product under some special circumstances and at scale
- How much your product is priced at (based on usage, audience or scale)
- The easiest way to buy the product
Isn’t that what a Pricing Table format (as made popular by WordPress and other template-based website builders), really is?
Samples of Product Pricing Tables
Zoom Pricing Table (screenshot from https://zoom.us/pricing last updated in Aug 2022)
Notice how the product features available are clearly marked as we move to the pricing tiers. They have nicely called out new features available now.
JIRA Pricing Table (screenshot from https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing last updated Aug 2022)
Notice how the tiers within product features (Basic, Advanced, etc) available are clearly marked as we move to the pricing tiers. They have nicely combined checkmarks and text.
Apple MacBook Pricing Table (screenshot from https://www.apple.com/in/mac/ last updated Aug 2022)
Notice the product features available are accompanied by clear visual companion/icons.
Ostinato Pricing Table screenshot from https://ostinato.org/pricing/#tiers last updated Aug 2022)
Notice how the discount is clearly marked with a slashed out ‘before’ sitting next to the current pricing.
Pricing Tables: An Excellent Way to Envision Your Product
If we flip the scene and instead of a later stage artefact about your product, use the Pricing Table to envision a product.
How can a Pricing Table help with a better envisioning of a product? A pricing table forces you to call out:
- Key features that make your product useful and valuable
- Allow a variety of users to try your product for free / limited time / limited capacity and what such users will find useful and valuable
- Progressively call out the additional features that add sufficient value to a specific audience who would pay extra
- Present all this information in a very succulently in a pictorial/graphical manner
- Above all, make it easy for someone to access your product with a low-friction buying process
With the value prop and price next to one another, the pricing table forces the Founder / Product Manager to confront the question: For this capability, will someone pay this much?
If you figure this out about your product, you have a path to success shaping up in front of you.
