Packaging
Packaging is the grouping of capabilities into purchasable units, and the rules governing what a buyer must take together and what they may take separately.
Packaging decides which capabilities are bundled, which are gated behind a tier, which are sold as add-ons, and which are never sold separately. Those are commercial decisions with delivery consequences: every separable component becomes a performance obligation finance has to allocate revenue across, and every gate becomes an entitlement that support and provisioning must enforce.
The design constraint is that packaging must create a reason to move up. A tier structure where the next tier adds capability nobody has asked for produces no expansion; a structure where the gate sits on the dimension that grows naturally produces expansion without a sales conversation.
Where it breaks
Tiers are drawn around engineering boundaries rather than buyer segments, so upgrades require a customer to want something unrelated to why they are growing.
Related terms
- Offer structure
- Offer structure is the decomposition of what a company sells into priceable, deliverable, and governable components.
- Unit Map
- The Unit Map distinguishes how the customer evaluates benefit, how price is calculated, what is billed, what the customer may access, and what drives delivery work.
- Pricing logic
- Pricing logic is the governing rule set that determines what any given customer pays, as distinct from a price list, which is only its output.
- Entitlement
- An entitlement is a specific right a customer has purchased, seats, usage volume, feature access, service level, expressed structurally rather than in contract prose.
Field notes on this
- Your pricing is a list, not a logic
A price list says what things cost today. It cannot say what to charge the deal in front of you, which is why realised price drifts and nobody owns the drift.