Maarten, we do the same job

Peter Janssens introduces himself with “I don’t care about titles.” On paper he is product director at Yesplan, venue and event software that runs everything “from the first idea of having a deal to getting an event organized”, in his words “a tremendous puzzle”: “All the rehearsals, all the small things that people don’t think of. The artists want flowers at the end of a performance, you can do it with Yesplan.” I have known Peter for years and admire his calm, structured thinking. He does not sell pricing advice, he thinks, I mean seriously thinks, about product. His opening line sets the tone for the whole conversation: “If you don’t know your unit of pricing, you won’t be successful.”

Roadmap and pricing: clash or north star?

I asked him whether roadmap and pricing clash or if pricing is the north star for the roadmap. His answer: “It’s the same.” In slow markets like healthcare you need a three-year roadmap or you are not in the market. But most of us are in fast-moving markets now, and there a roadmap is not about features. “It’s about the impact. It’s about the value. And what is pricing? You pay me for the value I deliver for you.” So for Peter, “there is no difference between product management and road mapping and pricing.” The execution differs but the essence does not.

The unit of pricing comes before the price point

This is not theory for him. “I had this discussion exactly today with my CEO on what will be the core unit of pricing of our new module.” The first question for any new capability is what triggers your market to buy it. Answer that, and you know whether you are building a module, an add-on for one segment, or something that belongs in your core packaging because everyone expects it. And the packaging has an anchor: “your first tier of packaging usually is what is your initial reason why your market is coming to you.”

The order in this approach matters most. The unit comes first, the packaging second, the number last. Almost everyone works the other way round, and then wonders why whatever price they ask, low or maximized, does not land.

The nine proof

Peter has a name for why pricing belongs this early, from the Dutch: de negenproef, the nine proof, the old arithmetic check that tells you whether your sum can be right. “If you do product management without pricing, probably you’re not sure whether you’re touching the right thing.” Pricing is the checkpoint of product management. If nobody would pay for the thing you are about to build, you have learned that before you built it. Sometimes you build it anyway, because a competitor has it and it is table stakes, but then you know what it is and where it goes: in the core, not on the price list.

He is strict about the discipline this creates: “I refused to start developing as long as we couldn’t have the talk on what is the difference in impact that we will create.” Name the impact first, then design, build, deploy.

A seat at the table, but not every seat

Should product be at the pricing table? Yes, but Peter draws the line finer than I expected. On the pricing model, alignment between product, CEO and sales is a no-brainer, “if you’re not aligned there, you risk to go all a different direction.” The price point is different. Some companies run fine on a directive CEO who sets the number and knows the market. “Personality and experience are for me more important than the role that you’re in to set the point.”

Two salespeople, one buyer

His thought experiment stuck with me. Imagine you need a solution and two salespeople present their product. One tells you a lot about the product, beautiful presentation, even shows the product. The other does the same, but shows how many people use it and the impact they achieve. The second one persuades many more buyers. The work behind that second website is hard, “finding out and experimenting with what can trigger, what can make a buyer move is such a hard but meaningful exercise.”

It is also the argument for finishing that job before running to the next feature, because otherwise “you risk a bit to end in average products.” Buying, he reminded me, “is a period of uncertainty for the buyer”, and you do not resolve uncertainty by copying features.

63% of the code, one customer

Peter audited a product and found 63% of the code lines were used by exactly one customer. Multiple customers on the product, but for that code, “there was not two customers using it. That’s a typical result of founders that have too long focused on the deals only and not on the stability of the product.” Deal-chasing is not an abstract risk. It is visible in your codebase, line by line.

AI: ask me next week

I asked him about AI. “Wonderful topic. Ask me next week and I will give you a different insight.” His distinction: AI is most disruptive inside the world of technical people, and products for developers are a hard market now, “any developer can just make the same product than the one that they are paying for, maybe in one day.” Simple-context SaaS, the send-my-ETA-to-my-wife products? “They’re dead.” But for complex problems he is not worried: “you still need intelligent people to steer, to guide your AI assistants.”

Meanwhile his own team maximizes AI in a way I like: “If we want to express an idea, we vibe-code it and we show it and we talk about the idea.” Instead of describing to developers what they need to make, they show it. “We solve such complex puzzles and problems that I’m not afraid so much that we will soon be replaced.”

Understand your value

I asked what is so obvious to him that founders miss it, and he went back to the core: “Understand your value. It’s the key. It’s so key in product management. It’s key in pricing. And that’s why we do the same job.” Product decides what to build from the value it creates, pricing decides what to charge from the value it captures, and neither works without the other. The only thing product does not decide alone is the price point; on the pricing model, “the product people are making a team with the CEO and with the sales people.”

That is the series in one sentence.

The full conversation with Peter Janssens is on YouTube, in the Tentacles of Pricing series.