| name | expansion-play-design |
| description | Design expansion motions that fire only when the partner has earned value — 3-gate eligibility (top-quartile health + demonstrable adoption + organizational readiness), value-trigger taxonomy, seat / module / department land-and-expand patterns, internal-champion-armament, ROI-storytelling format, and the "don't sell to bottom-quartile" discipline. Segment overlays for K-12 / higher-ed / corp L&D. Reach for this skill when designing the firm's expansion playbook or when the partner-success leader is being pushed to monetize too hard. Used by `success-playbook-designer` (primary). |
Skill: expansion-play-design
Invoked by: success-playbook-designer (primary — when authoring or refreshing the firm's expansion playbook), edtech-partner-success-manager (when a value-trigger fires on a specific partner and the play needs to be selected).
When to invoke: when designing the firm's expansion playbook; when a partner trips an expansion value-trigger; when leadership is pushing for expansion volume across the book and the PSM team needs a defensible gating discipline; when scoping a new product module's land-and-expand motion.
Output: an expansion motion (or refusal-to-expand decision) with gated eligibility, value-trigger evidence, internal-champion-armament artifacts, and a segment-appropriate land path.
The core opinion this skill encodes
Don't sell. PSM ≠ AE. (Team constitution §3 #10.) The PSM's job is to make the partner succeed at what they bought, not to close more. Expansion motions exist, but they fire when the partner has earned value — not on a quarterly quota.
Two things go wrong when this discipline lapses:
- Expansion attempt on a yellow / red account burns credibility. The partner reads it as the vendor monetizing too hard during their pain, and the renewal slips.
- Expansion attempt without adoption depth produces shelfware. The partner buys more, doesn't use it, and the next renewal has a worse-not-better story.
This skill is the gate that prevents both failure modes.
The 3-gate eligibility model
All three gates must be open. Any one closed → no expansion ask. No exceptions for end-of-quarter pressure.
Gate 1 — Top-quartile health
Per partner-health-scoring.md. The composite is in the top quartile and none of the red-flag triggers are active. If the score is yellow because a single signal dropped but otherwise stable, that's a yellow — not an expansion candidate.
Gate 2 — Demonstrable adoption
Not "they're using it" — measurably using the load-bearing features at the depth the original success plan called for. Concretely:
- The single most-load-bearing workflow is at 80%+ of intended-user uptake
- At least one named outcome from the success plan is materialized with sourced numbers
- Usage is sustained over the last 90 days (not a one-quarter spike)
If adoption is trending up but hasn't crossed these thresholds, expansion is premature — the play is "drive adoption" not "expand."
Gate 3 — Organizational readiness
A signal that the partner organization is in an additive posture, not a defensive one:
- New fiscal-year budget being planned (not a mid-cycle squeeze)
- New sponsor / champion arriving with energy (often a new dean, superintendent, or L&D leader who wants to make a move)
- Second department / school / business-line asking for access (pull, not push)
- Heavy-use threshold crossed by a sub-group (a specific school within a district, a specific team within an L&D rollout)
Organizational readiness is the gate that's most often skipped because it's qualitative. Skip it and the expansion lands in a partner-org that doesn't have the bandwidth to absorb it; the expansion looks good in the quarter and dies in the next.
The value-trigger taxonomy
The play fires because something happened on the partner side, not because the calendar quarter is closing.
| Trigger | What it looks like | The expansion shape it implies |
|---|
| Heavy-use threshold crossed | Active-user count exceeds licensed seats; seats over-utilized | Seat expansion (more seats) |
| Named outcome achieved | A success-plan outcome materialized with sourced numbers | Module expansion (depth into the same workflow) OR multi-year commit |
| Second-department-asks signal | A team / school / department adjacent to the buyer pings the champion asking for access | Department / school / business-line expansion |
| New fiscal-year budget being planned | Sponsor signals planning for next year's investments | Multi-year commit OR feature-tier upgrade |
| New sponsor / champion arrives | Org change brings in someone with energy to invest | Re-onboard the new sponsor (per executive-sponsor-mapping.md) before any expansion ask |
| Comparable peer expanded | Anonymized peer partner did the expansion + got measurable value | Reference-led expansion (loop in advocacy-program-design.md) |
Anti-pattern: invented triggers. "QBR is next week and we should have an expansion ask ready" is not a value-trigger. The trigger taxonomy is finite; if no trigger fired, no play fires.
The expansion patterns (land paths)
Seat expansion
The simplest motion. Partner is over-utilizing licensed seats; the expansion ask is "true up to your actual usage."
- Evidence: utilization >100% over last 90 days
- Risk: low if utilization is real; high if it's roster bloat (see
rostering-data-quality.md)
Module expansion (more product surface)
Partner has depth in one workflow and a clear next workflow tied to a stated outcome.
- Evidence: load-bearing workflow at 80%+; second workflow named in success plan
- Risk: medium — buying a second module without the bandwidth to adopt it is shelfware
Department / school / business-line expansion
Pull-not-push: an adjacent group within the partner asks for access.
- Evidence: documented internal request (email, meeting note); sponsor confirms the adjacent group has budget
- Risk: medium-low when pulled, high when pushed
Multi-year commit
Not strictly an expansion of scope — an expansion of commitment. Useful when the partner wants budget-defense (corp L&D) or price-hold (K-12).
- Evidence: sponsor signals long-horizon planning
- Risk: low for the partner (price lock); requires careful framing in K-12 (annual-appropriation constraint — see segment overlay)
Feature-tier upgrade
Partner is on a baseline tier; usage has reached the ceiling features that the higher tier unlocks.
- Evidence: feature-usage data hitting tier limits
- Risk: medium — easy to dress up as a renewal-time pitch rather than a value-trigger fire
Internal-champion-armament
Expansion decisions happen inside the partner organization, in conversations the PSM isn't in. The PSM's job is to make the internal champion's case easy to make.
The armament pack:
- Outcome story in ROI-storytelling format (see below) — paste-able into an internal memo
- Comparable-peer reference (anonymized, via
advocacy-program-design.md) — a peer school / department / team that did the expansion and got the outcome
- Implementation realism — what the partner needs to commit (people, time, budget) to absorb the expansion. Honest, not promotional. This is what the champion's CFO will ask about; better surfaced now.
- Risk register — top 2-3 risks the champion should know about. Showing the risks earns more trust than hiding them.
- Cost-of-alternative — what not expanding looks like (status quo problems that the expansion would solve)
Anti-pattern: the armament pack is a sales deck. It's an internal-decision-aid. Different artifact, different tone.
ROI-storytelling format
Every outcome claim in the armament pack uses this shape (matches the variance-commentary discipline in the broader plugin):
- Outcome — what changed, in the partner's framing
- Driver — what specifically the partner did that produced the change
- Measurement — the data, with source, date range, comparison baseline
- Period — when this materialized
Example:
Outcome: District-wide reading-fluency improvement for K-3.
Driver: Teacher adoption of the small-group instruction workflow reached 78% by week 8 (vs. 22% in non-adopting peer districts).
Measurement: DIBELS Composite Score, Sept-March, +12% vs. same-grade prior cohort.
Period: 2025-26 school year, partial year data through March.
A claim without one of those four elements gets discounted by the partner's CFO. Build the discipline in.
The "don't pitch to bottom-quartile" discipline
This is the most-violated rule in expansion playbooks because it cuts against quarterly pressure.
An expansion ask in a yellow or red account is two failures at once:
- Credibility burn — the partner reads it as the vendor monetizing during their pain. It puts the renewal at risk for a deal that wouldn't have closed anyway.
- Misallocation — the PSM time spent crafting the ask is time not spent on the recovery play. The opportunity cost is the renewal itself.
If leadership is pushing expansion volume across the book, the right answer is "here are the partners that pass the 3-gate model" — not "here is expansion attempted on partners that don't." Document the 3-gate filtering when reporting; it makes the discipline visible and defensible.
Segment-specific overlays
K-12
- Per-school → per-district expansion is the most natural land path. A successful pilot in 2 schools earns the right to a district-wide deployment in the next budget cycle.
- Federal / state funding cycles matter. ESSER cliff has passed; remaining sources are Title I, state per-pupil allocations, and grant cycles. Expansion budget is harder than it was in 2022-23. Don't assume the budget is there.
- Board approval is required for material expansion (district-wide deployments). Timeline = April-June board windows. Multi-year is the exception (annual-appropriation principle).
- Curriculum director is often the right buyer for module expansion; CFO / business manager for seat expansion; superintendent for district-wide.
Higher-ed
- Department → school → university expansion is the analog of K-12's per-school → per-district. A successful department pilot earns the school-wide deployment ask; school-wide earns university-wide.
- Procurement-led RFP risk at the university-wide tier. Build the incumbent-defense play in parallel (loop in
partner-profile-curator).
- Faculty governance delays material expansions. Build the timeline for the relevant senate / governance window.
Corp L&D
- Team → department → enterprise expansion. L&D leaders typically pilot in one business line, then expand across the business.
- Fiscal year drives the expansion window. Pitch in the planning quarter, not at FY-end.
- L&D budgets are first-cut. Expansion ask requires defense-of-existing-spend AND cost-of-alternative — not just outcome.
Anti-patterns this skill flags
- Quota-driven expansion attempts on red accounts. The credibility burn outlives the quarter.
- Expansion before adoption. Buying more shelfware. The play library should refuse.
- No internal-champion armament. Champion is sent into the internal decision conversation empty-handed.
- Feature-push framing ("our new module") vs. outcome-led framing ("the next outcome you can earn"). The first is AE work; the second is PSM work.
- Bundling expansion into a yellow renewal. Conflates the conversations; burns both.
- Skipping organizational readiness. All three gates must be open; the qualitative one is the most-skipped.
- Reference to a non-comparable peer. A higher-ed peer does not validate a K-12 expansion; a manufacturing L&D peer doesn't validate a financial-services L&D expansion. Segment-match.
- Inventing a value-trigger. The taxonomy is finite. If no trigger fired, no play fires.
Hygiene checklist
Before sending an expansion play into execution:
When NOT to invoke
- The partner is in active recovery. Use
recovery-play-design.md.
- The partner is in the renewal window (T-60 or closer) and the health isn't green. Defer expansion to post-renewal.
- The PSM is being asked to "find an expansion play" without a value-trigger. The skill's job is to refuse in that case; produce the 3-gate filtered list of eligible accounts instead.
- The partner is bottom-quartile in adoption but top-quartile in seat utilization (a "broad-but-shallow" signal). Drive depth first.
Refresh triggers
- A pattern of post-expansion churn — the 3-gate model isn't gating tightly enough
- A pattern of "expansion-trigger fired but no expansion landed" — the armament pack isn't equipping the champion
- A new product module changes the module-expansion path
- Segment mix shifts — overlay weighting needs re-tuning
References
