Happy New Year and what’s up in 2026

I’m extremely grateful to be in this tribe and wish you all a stellar 2026.

I’d like to share some thoughts…

I’ve spent the last 6+ years at AWS helping software companies scale SaaS/AI and put product into customer hands. Additionally in my prior roles as product management where I have built billing systems, and processing billions in usage, subscriptions, custom, and other flavors of pricing and packaging - of course taken this globally, I find myself in a few repeated conclusions.

1. The work of pricing is never done. Product shifts, market shifts, trends force change, economic factors influence behavior, and what may have been today’s problem, isn’t tomorrow’s problem - traditional BI, Excel, and tools are not working.

2. Pricing only works when there is TRUE cross functional alignment AND execution - Continues to be an issue and is success is derailed with internal factors.

3. There is no such thing as the perfect pricing and packaging - tomorrows pricing and packaging teams will work closely with growth, be heavy in experimentation, and behave like builders.

4. It’s never a pricing problem - what the GTM, whats the pain point, what’s the sales comp, is it new or existing customer, and finally have you actually orchestrated the tech stack to perform?

5. Plan for the ICP/Persona for launch but plan to shift and discover new ones.

6. The role of pricing leaders is not to price, but to enable product and GTM teams to incorporate the vision, strategy, and monetization early in product, feature, market launch as early as possible. Pricing leaders will coach and find growth opportunities, revenue leakage, experiment, and uncover money left on the table.

Finally - profitable growth is the only metric that matters. Sometimes it’s strategic to flex on profit, or growth, and then settle on both.

Thank you and look forward to your own thoughts.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaypatel07?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

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