packaging

name	packaging
description	Design product packages or tiers by grouping customer outcomes, capabilities, limits, service levels, and expansion paths into understandable offers that support segmentation without arbitrary feature hostage-taking.

Packaging

Use when deciding which capabilities, limits, support levels, or usage allowances belong together in plans or editions.

Procedure

1. Define target segments, their core jobs, willingness to pay, usage patterns, maturity, and reasons they may need different offers.
2. Inventory capabilities, usage limits, service levels, compliance or administrative features, and cost drivers that could form meaningful packaging dimensions.
3. Group around complete customer outcomes rather than randomly distributing essential workflow pieces to manufacture tiers.
4. Choose fences that correlate with segment value or cost, such as scale, governance, collaboration, advanced workflow, or service level.
5. Ensure each package has a clear audience, coherent promise, upgrade reason, and usable baseline without needing sales explanation for every distinction.
6. Model common customer journeys through trial, initial purchase, expansion, downgrade, and plan migration.
7. Check operational complexity across billing, entitlement, support, documentation, sales, analytics, and engineering before adding variants.
8. Validate comprehension and conversion with customer research or experiments and simplify tiers that create confusion without segmentation value.

Decision rules

• Packaging is customer segmentation expressed as offers, not a feature-storage exercise.
• Do not break a core workflow merely to create an upgrade gate.
• More plans increase operational and cognitive cost.
• Good upgrade paths follow growing customer value or needs.

Quality gate

Packaging is ready when each offer serves a recognizable segment and complete use case, fences are defensible, upgrade and downgrade paths make sense, entitlement complexity is manageable, and customers can understand the differences without a matrix of arbitrary exceptions.