[00:00:00] INTRO: Welcome to Unpack Pricing, the show that deconstructs the dark arts of SaaS pricing and packaging. I'm your host, Scott Woody, co-founder and CEO of Metronome. In each episode, you'll learn how the best leaders in tech are turning pricing into a key driver for revenue growth. Let's dive in.

[00:00:23] Scott: I'm excited to welcome Vina to the podcast. Thank you for joining us today. 

[00:00:27] Vina: Thanks for having me. Super excited to chat. 

[00:00:29] Scott: Awesome. Okay. Well, as a by way of a little bit of intro and then I'll let Vina kind of do the details. Vina's the VP of product management for Twilio's Commerce platform, and she owns the customer experience and the sales -ed deal flow as well as usage-based billing at one of the largest... especially largest public companies that does usage-based billing. So I'm super excited to learn about her unique takes on how billing and product and customer experience all all lends together. So maybe I'll start off, Vina, by just asking you to do a quick kind of walk through of your experience in the space and kind of where have you worked and what are the notable things that you've done in the past couple of years of your career?

[00:01:07] Vina: Yeah, so maybe I'll just say you know, I've been in product management for 20 some odd years. I've worked in sort of retail e-commerce, I've worked in sort of SaaS platforms before. And in the last two iterations of my career, I've really focused on commerce and FinTech have always been underlying theme, but really focused on commerce from a SaaS-based billing perspective.

I worked at Atlassian prior to working at Twilio and at Atlassian, I was responsible for basically the new version of our commerce platform. We had a monolith and we were sort of rebuilding for the future and scalability for Atlassian. And now I'm at Twilio and really, similar themes from a public company that has multiple products that wants to be able to offer the right experience for the customers and the right sales experience too, as well as revenue recognition.

So, own everything from our self-service console, purchase experience, as well as deep integrations into our sales force and our billing, as well as how we push data into our ERP. 

[00:02:17] Scott: Awesome. Okay. Well, it's rare to talk to someone who's kind of worked at two very large, very successful companies that are both public and stay in the billing space.

So, I would actually love to start by learning a little bit more, maybe with Atlassian. And it's kind of a random question, but I'm very curious because I've worked with a number of people who've come out of the Atlassian product marketing and growth side of things.

And the thing that struck me is that you all understand commercialization of products and I would love to hear a little bit about the why, what about Atlassian or what about your training there, or your work there kind of inculcated this deep sense of the linkage of what the product does, but also how you pay for it?

I'm super curious. 

[00:02:59] Vina: So,maybe the best way to talk about that is Atlassian has a deep culture for customer self-service. And so until, I think, maybe the last five years, did they really have any sales teams, you know? Over the last 20-something years, the way people acquired any Atlassian products was you would log into their console.

You would look at, what was available, even though it was maybe bifurcated, you know, they have multiple products and as they had more acquisitions over the years, maybe had to go to different consoles, but it was very much about customer transparency, understanding what the product is and being able to sort of add it to a cart and be able to buy it. There wasn't a ton of flexibility initially in negotiation of pricing. So they were pretty strict about like, scale your offering and you get discounts. And, that's how they sold their product for many, many years. And then, five or so years ago, maybe, maybe even six or seven years ago, they were like, 'Hey, we're really missing on some of the bigger deals', even though they had the big deals in the pipeline and, and we're landing them, there were very large whales that obviously want negotiated pricing. And that self-service component was less applicable for them. And so they really started to invest in a sales organization and building out their quote-to-cash experience. I would just say, learning from Atlassian and thinking about the customer first, understanding how the behaviors of both the customer, their needs and the product tie together.

Because when you have a console-based purchase experience where customers just self-serve, you really have to make it automated. There's no manual intervention. And so understanding the product, understanding customer behavior, and then tying those two things together in a purchase journey that doesn't require people, I think is foundational to my thinking.

[00:04:53] Scott: Awesome. That actually resonates a lot. I think we at Dropbox, we imported a lot of Atlassian DNA into our monetization teams. Everything you said it like directly tracks. I'm actually really curious, kind of following up one layer. How do you think that changes the role of product managers in that world?

Because I have to imagine now what you're expecting is you're building a product experience that both like, you know, delivers value via product, but also has to connect to the commercialization, the buying journey. So maybe, are there any things that you noticed or maybe things you learned as a product manager in the product or to kind of unify those two in a seamless way?

[00:05:33] Vina: I would say that the role of product manager really sort of ended up spanning. All the domains that sit around it, and I can expand that to say, when you're thinking about commerce, and this was sort of already true if you're in a sales-led motion, but in a self-service, console-based, customer-first purchase journey experience, you have to understand really well the adjacent domains to [00:06:00] billing, right? And so, customer intent, understanding our marketing motion, how customers land, taking that data and helping surface the right things for that customer in the moment when they're starting that customer journey? I think that's probably the biggest takeaway. But you can also reverse that and say, that's also true in the finance space, like the best product managers that understand the domains that sit around billing super well. Like, how do you think about driving opportunities, right? And how do you convert opportunities? What does that look like? 

And then when you convert the opportunities, how does finance manage revenue and what are the levers in tax and what are the levers, in cash? Like there's a bunch of things that you have to understand to be basically a good product manager and also be able to manage your stakeholders really well,right? 

And I know maybe I'm jumping ahead, but like, those things matter in being super successful when you're running an ecosystem that tends to sit between a whole bunch of other ecosystems, right? So you really do have to build those bridges both personally and from a stakeholder perspective, but you also have to kind of become a little bit of a SME in those domains as well to be able to be effective as you know, when you think about billing. 

[00:07:21] Scott: I think you hit on like a bunch of themes that I think at least resonate with me, one of which is this concept of you're in the middle of a journey for the customer.

So you need to understand where they're coming from and you need to understand where the output of your stuff is going, like into finance. And then the deep kind of relational, especially cross-functional, cause you're working a lot with other teams that maybe don't even report up into the same leadership chain, like finance, et cetera.

So very, very interesting. Cool. Well, I would love to then maybe take that and kind of look at it from a second lens, which was Twilio. And so maybe talk a little bit about kind of the move to Twilio and then what were the notable similarities and maybe some of the notable differences between how those two orgs ran.

[00:08:08] Vina: Yeah, the similarities are you still have the same stakeholders, basically. You have marketing, you have sales and they tend to have the same levers. And so once you've done it a couple of times, you kind of know, again, you have your domain 

So that's helpful. The thing that's different at Twilio...  Twilio is a customer engagement platform today but really started as a telecommunications aggregator essentially, right? And that business feels a lot like a payments business if you're familiar with Stripe or Braintree or Audion, right? Like we charge per event, like a credit card transaction or an SMS message.

So you can have thousands, hundreds, billions of those, right? And they're happening very quickly and so the pace at which you have to price and manage events is very different than software, you know. Software is you buy software, you get access and you use it. And I'm simplifying it, software is obviously not that easy or everyone would, you know, be doing that.

But the challenge is definitely different in a world like Twilio, where you've got low latency event types that have to be priced and billed and collected. And, you know, accounting isn't real time. You can have adjustments and backdating that happened. You can have contracts that reshape the events that have previously already happened.

And so, it's the same problem, but maybe a little bit more multidimensional in that time is now one of those things that before I didn't have to care about. Awesome. 

And I feel like, you know, that right? Like Metrodome is known for that as well. So...

[00:09:45] Scott: yeah, well, I do think it's one of the striking things 'cause I came from Dropbox, which was subscription-based, seat-based. And you know, the end of every month, every quarter was always frenetic. But what I think I had underappreciated is that in usage, it's like. Every day is frenetic. Every minute, every second, right? It's like the data pipeline doesn't stop at any point.

And so it's like a different level of criticality. Actually, the analogy I like to think about is that theoretically in a seat-subscription model, your billing system could be like a set of scripts that run once a month. In fact, almost every small startup, that's what they do.

But in a usage world, like that's just, you know, from minute one, it's more of a real-time problem. It's more of a continuous problem. And it feels a lot more like infrastructure, as opposed... like the billing system is infra, not internal tools. And I think that's like exciting, but also kind of adds layers and layers of, stress and hardship.

Okay so, the move from Atlassian to Twilio is really about, 'Okay, let's move into a domain that in some sense is more continuous, more close to payments, very high volume'. You know, I think both of the companies were obviously very big, very successful. And I think one of the things that you highlighted is they're both multi-product. I would love to hear a little bit about kind of how the multi-product aspect affected your teams and affects you and your teams. How does that lens through what you're doing in the billing and the commerce side of things?

[00:11:15] Vina: Yeah, I think actually that's probably a similarity which both organizations held, which is, they were looking at their growth trajectories and the way that they wanted to sell their products. Atlassian started with Jira and Confluence and then sort of the pricing models that came out of Jira and Confluence as they built new products themselves were very similar 'cause you just attach them to the way that you're thinking about selling. But then they acquired a bunch of companies like Trello and the same thing for Twilio, you know, we started with voice and messaging which is a very event-based type of billing model, and then we acquired Segment and we also acquired SendGrid, which is still a consumption-based product, but it's not as time-consumptive as like SMS and voice.

And so now you've got all these products and there are more products in both organizations that I'm not mentioning, but those are the big, you know, mainstays that people think about. And a customer would come and try to, either talk to a salesperson or, you know, go on to consoles and try to purchase them.

And you realize you have to buy it multiple times, and you're getting multiple invoices and. I'm not a hundred percent convinced customers care that much about the number of invoices that they get. They care about being able to understand what products they're purchasing and how those products align to their business needs and being able to reconcile them.

And, obviously if you get a hundred invoices versus two customers probably care. But the main thesis for both organizations was unify, simplify, make that customer experience easy, also make it easy for customers to expand because it was hard. Both organizations experienced sales expansion was hard because... I don't know another way to say this, and I don't want to get super technical, but like the primitives of each foundational system were so different, right?

And how you sold based on the product behavior in each system was so different that you had to have a separate system. And until you took a unifying view on how did these products interact and how am I going to sell them together based on how they interact and what do I want to change?

'Cause you do have to make trade off decisions when you get to that space in order to get to your ultimate vision, which is, to sell things together, enable easy expansion for customers, right? Like easy reconciliation across a single platform so that they're not like traversing multiple consoles to be able to say like, how many did I use? Like, how many seats do I have? That type of thing. And so I think those are very... I feel like very standard problems for companies, the size of Atlassian and Twilio that have done a fair amount of acquisition and I think both companies actually did this. They were late to integration into their core platforms and so they bought companies and just let them be. And then because that impacted the customer experience and the sales experience and the RevRec experience, right? Like, it's a chain of events that have to happen, at a certain point you're like, this is not sustainable. And then they have to make decisions about what does the future look like and what do our products look like? What is our sales motion look like, and then therefore what do the underlying systems have to look like? 

[00:14:35] Scott: Yeah. I think what you just said is really on point. One way I've thought about it is kind of the theory of an acquisition is you want to get two products and together they're better than the sum of their parts, right? 

[00:14:48] Vina: Right. 

[00:14:48] Scott: And if your commercial model or heaven forbid, you're like, literal, like, way of billing is completely disjoint, then you kind of make it harder to purchase the two things together. And so in some sense, you're cutting against the kind of core theory of the acquisition by not centralizing. Actually now I'm like super curious, you've seen this in two different realms. Let's say that you were advising another company that was thinking about a large acquisition and the business model was similar, but slightly different. Like, how would you think about advising that company on, on this unification? Are there certain scenarios where you wouldn't think unification makes sense? And then just practically, how would you run that process? How long would you give it? How would you set up the teams to make sure that this kind of ends in a, you know, better together story?

[00:15:41] Vina: Yeah. I will say I have never experienced a situation -- And this actually happened to me. I worked for Braintree, which is a PayPal company prior to joining Atlassian. And just quick history- Braintree was purchased by eBay. Braintree owned Venmo. Braintree was a big startup. They purchased Venmo, eBay purchased Venmo. Braintree and then eBay split from PayPal and Braintree and Venmo went with PayPal. And so long, long history there, but PayPal and eBay had long said Braintree, you're your own entity. We'll treat you separately. You just make revenue, basically. And at a certain point, and I would say maybe 2019, or maybe even 2018, before then, there started to be a real strategy around like, what does Braintree and PayPal offer our customers and our merchants and thinking about them collectively. Took them a long time. I think seven or so years before they started having those conversations. But you know, the same thing with Atlassian, the same thing with Twilio. So I don't know, unless you're just a holdings company, I don't know what the strategy is for acquiring a company if you're not going to unify it. And I've never been in this situation, but I've read about and I've already forgotten which company it was, but I was reading about a company that basically their acquisition strategy is you have to integrate and sometimes integration is essentially rebuilding as much as possible to like unify into the platform because you're going to have to do that pain anyway. And so just do it up front so that you don't wait for five or ten years and you're losing value and you can't cross sell or expand.

So, I've never been in that situation, but I would say sort of depending on where you are in that life cycle as a startup because obviously, doing that is costly and probably would be trade off decisions in other areas that might be important for your opportunity as a startup, but I would just say, really try to understand why you purchased this company and at what point do you expect to see value from it?

And if you're expecting to see value in three years, maybe start to evaluate, like, should we start doing an integration sooner rather than later? Because, it's painful and it's going to happen. You might as well do it to enable your business to take full advantage of that acquisition.

[00:17:58] Scott: Yeah. Again, you're in a very unique position, right? Where, cause your team is one of the core integration points that has, you know, commerce and kind of how customers buy, like that's a pretty central team for making two products work together. Maybe what are a couple lessons you've learned about doing that integration, even if it is painful, like, in the end plus one, then the next one, what did you learn from the first five that, you're going to apply forward to the next one to make it, you know, incrementally easier?

[00:18:26] Vina: I think maybe a learning, which has almost nothing to do with billing is that people don't care about billing if you're not responsible for it. I remember having conversations both at Twilio and at Atlassian where, you know, you're like asking questions like, what do you think the customer experience is going to be here?

And how are you planning on selling this? What's your charge model? And the product managers for the products are like, we just want it to work, you know, in a lot of ways. And so one of the learnings is like, you really also have to be an advocate for people understanding how important commerce and selling and purchase journeys are for the business.

And in a lot of ways ,maybe it's ego, but, I think, purchase journeys sit second seat to product and value for your customer. Obviously customers don't come to Twilio for their purchase journey, they come to Twilio for telecommunications services, for phone numbers to send SMSs and voice and all of that stuff.

But if you can't charge for it, you don't have a business. And so really second seat is you got to understand how our business runs and commerce is how the business runs. So maybe number one learning is like, you really have to be an advocate because people who are responsible for thinking about the product behavior often don't think about any other component other than like, you know, I have to do a deal with a carrier...

I have to make sure that these 4 things happen... and I'm building AI on top of all of these things, which, you know, is great value for our customers. But they also miss a whole half of how customers experience the product. 

Maybe a more tactical example of that, and we saw this at Atlassian, but I don't remember the use case as much, and there's examples of this at Twilio where... and maybe this won't land as well, but like at Twilio, you get an account and that account is a container. And you could put anything in that container and we'll charge you based on the thing, or we'll charge you based on the account. At Segment, which is, you know, obviously owned by Twilio, you create a workspace and you create projects, which is a very SaaS experience. And you have guardrails about the types of things you can create in the project and you sell at the project level. And so how you think about these two things and how you build a unifying Sales motion and pricing strategy, especially if you're combining the products, you have to really question basically the product again, primitives, right?

Like, if I'm combining these two things, what does that look like? And then how would I apply a pricing model on top of that? So that's sort of tactical, but it's a big conversation in reality. Like, you know, it's foundational. You don't realize you're questioning the product value. Like how does this work, right? How do customers attach? Like, how are they going to experience this product? And then how do you monetize on top of that? So I would say those two things. 

[00:21:27] Scott: Yeah. I think what you said is exactly right. In a sense, like one of the things that I believe very strongly you know, I think you just said is in a sense how you buy is the product, right? Like, the difference between something that's free and something that you pay for is how you buy. And so if a customer can use the thing, but you can't get paid for it, well, they're not going to be able to use it for very long because you're about to go out of business.

And I think a lot of it, in some sense, what I feel about a lot of internal, like billing teams internally as their job is to help people understand that, like, look. We are a business and how you buy is another way of getting value for the end customer. Because if they can't buy it, then they're not going to get much value from it.

Well, since you're such a deep expert in this space, I would love to know what's something that you believe that's slightly heretical or maybe off norm from what other of your peers at other companies might believe about billing.

[00:22:23] Vina: Yeah. I've already sort of talked a little bit about it, but it's that a purchase journey is. Really a customer experience. Like these things, I, you know, I go to these conferences about billing or talk to other experts in the field about billing. And everyone really focuses on, you know, finance and revenue recognition.

Like these systems are a CIO type of finance and revenue recognition. And can we close our books, you know, timely, appropriately, correctly, which are important, by the way, I don't, I don't want to diminish that in any way, but. Okay. In reality, it is both a finance system and a customer experience system and how you monetize your customer experience for your products.

I feel like people don't think about it that way very often. And, you know, maybe I'll give you an example at Twilio, which you can go discover yourself. And I think you guys offer this as well, but when you come to Twilio, you open an account and when you open an account out, you get a 15 trial and that 15 trial is run by our billing system where we're, you know, give you a credit and then, you know, as you use some of our product, we decrement, you know, your total, your balance.

And then when you want to convert, you give us a credit card and you pay as you go. You give us a hundred dollars or 50 or 20 or whatever, and you get this balance. It's a prepayment. And as you use our product, which is, you know, basically micro payments, depending on how many transactions you do we decrement your balance.

That is a customer experience that drives our PLG motion. How we acquire new customers is very directly tied to that ‘pay as you go’ model and there's value for customers there, right? Like developers don't know if they want to commit to Twilio. And so they don't want to, you know, give a background check information.

They don't want to send, you know, all of this information just to be invoiced. They just want to try the product and having a credit card with the prepayment balance available is really helpful to, to start that motion. And then the other side of that is on the finance side. Now you have a risk mitigator.

You have a balance that they can't use anything beyond that. And so we are, you know, obviously there's There's things that can happen, but for the most part, like your cap, your company risk is capped based on that balance, right? And so it's both good for the company and it's good for the customers to be able to come and try and determine if Twilio is the place for them.

So that's a great example of why, how billing really drives foundationally. a customer experience and it is good [00:25:00] for customers. 

[00:25:00] Scott: Yeah, I could not agree more. I have like several slide decks where I just pull up Twilio's billing page as like an example of like billing. It's like you can separate it out, but it is your product.

It is your customer experience. It is how customers realize value. And that's super critical. And you guys have done a great job there. I'm really curious. How does that translate to changes and how you run your billing organization. So this idea that it's not just about closing the books every month, but it is about also helping customers understand and find value in your product. Like what is different about your org than maybe a mirror organization, but you only cared about, like, for instance, the CIO?

[00:25:48] Vina: Yeah. I think we're product managers, right? Like we think about customers and, and, you know, we. I've heard from other people who have been in similar roles that feel like they are order takers from a sales organization, a finance organization, and they're just developing what they're being told.

And they're not thinking about the implications of these things and how all of these things connect together and how that drives. An experience, whether that's a customer or a finance person or a salesperson, or, you know, a console, like all of these things have to be tied together and thought through to say, you know, what is that experience look like?

And so we, we think about the customer and we work backwards from the customer to say, you know, if we do this, what's the risk of fraud or what's the risk of, you know, the pricing model, what happens when the customer lifecycle traverses, you know, you do a sales transition, you move from one type of customer to another type of customer.

Oh my gosh, you, you're going to have a problem because these two things are going to be an issue. So how do we solve for those types of things? So like, we think about the customer, right? Which I think has generically been what I've heard… like we did this at Atlassian too. So, I can't say that I've never been an order taker in my product management life.

But I have heard from other organizations that have been like, I feel like an order taker. And I'm like, well, let me tell you, I'm not going to work in your organization. If you expect me to be an order taker for sure. And I won't run an organization where we, you know, do what we're told, right? Not that we don't want to solve those problems, but we want to understand the root of what those are and how we can make them best. How we can solve those in the best way for the stakeholder or for our customers or for the business?

[00:27:42] Scott: Yeah. What you just said, I think I would break the billing world into two models. One where the billing team, their customer is. It's like finance and sales in some sense. It's like, and that I think lends itself to more of an internal order taking function.

And then the others who were like, yes, those are our customers, but we actually have a harder job. Our job is also our end customers are also our customers. We have to do both. And I do think that that approach obviously is very much in some sense what Metronomes predicated on.

But I think, ultimately is what leads to better outcomes for the business. Because to your point, the purchase experience is a huge part of your product. I think anyone who's ever built a mobile app knows this viscerally, right? Because if you have the constraints of purchasing on mobile, you know, that you live and die by your ability to monetize through that app store and how that works.

And it's like the product experience in some sense in mobile is completely architected around purchase and payment. And I think in other types of software and infra, you can kind of let that not live in your head, but I do think it like it's a better, business outcome.. 

I'm really curious about how…so Twilio is one of the, you know, biggest usage-based billing companies on earth, and by volume, by number of customers, by almost every metric. How do you run that team? Like, you know, generally, how do you think about priorities and especially now that you have multiple different kinds of customers, you have the end customer, you have internal teams, you have other internal teams. Like, how do you run your prioritization process? How do you think about where to invest, you know, the next quarter's set of, of, of engineering and product time? 

[00:29:27] Vina: So, I think maybe. Maybe the sort of tactical answer is we have OKRs, right? And those OKRs ladder up to broader business objectives for Twilio at large but understanding when to prioritize like a sales problem versus a support issue or a revenue recognition problem or a customer experience issue. We basically break it up into buckets, right? So we'll look at our customer experience, basically our self-service experience bucket. And what do we want to do? How do we want to invest over a period of time? And that can be over a single quarter. It can be over sort of be hag like longer term, these are the outcomes we want to slowly get to and we'll prioritize them as we go. And maybe the second bucket is essentially customer experience with their billing administration is a big deal, right? Like, once you actually purchase, how do you drive transparency around the things that you purchased?

How do you reconcile what you purchased and used, whether you're a pay as you go customer or you're an invoiced customer. And obviously, we also have APIs that respond, send responses related to billing, too. So we also include API responses in that sort of I'd call it billing transparency bucket.

And then, you know, we also have a third bucket, which is essentially, how do we think of the future of the platform? And how are we investing longer term in supporting our product innovations, which are AI-based and how you sort of add Segment intelligence into messaging and how we're going to price for those types of things.

And so that's that third bucket, which is certainly a BHAG and how we think about developing our platform in that longer term realm, which is going back to my example of the difference between an account and a workspace and a project is an active, you know, an active thought process that we were pulling on that thread actively.

[00:31:26] Scott: Cool. Actually, because you kind of started to go into it. I would love to learn a little bit more about the kind of key relationships that, you know, a leader in your position, like who are the key departments or kind of outside your organization folks that you find yourself spending the most time with?

[00:31:45] Vina: I would say obviously our, the Salesforce lead our finance lead, our tax lead and then, you know, We look at a lot of customer data, so just looking at spending time with customers, going to, you know, customer advisory boards and hearing about customers experience, which is both painful and wonderful at the same time.

And you know, looking at data, hearing from customers. Also, I get added to a lot of escalation calls. So, hearing directly from customers about their experience is also super helpful. Like, you know, ‘Hey, I'm an ISV and I want to be able to do this’. And ‘How come I can't do these types of things’? And you're like, ‘Oh, I didn't know that was a use case.

Like, let's figure out how we can, you know, help solve for these types of things. So, you know, customers in and of themselves are a huge component of what I would consider a stakeholder. 

[00:32:36] Scott: That kind of fits the theme that the end customer is one of your core customers. Because your team almost sits in between like sales and finance, and it's like the bridging team.

What are the moments where that relationship gets strained the most? What are the kinds of events that happen in the business? And then how do you build resiliency across that cross functional working team for those moments? 

[00:32:59] Vina: I would say the moments it gets strained is when you're changing, when there's change, like transformation that's happening.

Cause you have to rethink things, right? Like most of those functions are really focused on workflow. Workflow is a playbook. These things happen, and this is how we're going to address these things happening. That doesn't mean there's not innovation, but it really is about repetitive solving of this problem, right?

And that problem happens all the time. So when you have to reinvent that workflow or make changes to a pricing model, right? Like you have to have those conversations again. Maybe the best example of that I've had is actually at Atlassian. 

We had a very opinionated and engaged and wonderful finance partner. And she really knew the Atlassian business. Like she had been with Atlassian for I would say day three, you know, from the beginning of Atlassian. And I remember we were trying to build an onboarding experience and Atlassian doesn't have this prepayment model. So you have to be invoiced, you know. You have to be invoiced, even though you can pay net zero with a credit card at the end of that invoice.

So you still have 30 days of risk, essentially which is less worrisome in a SaaS business. It's super worrisome in a usage-based business. And we were like, Hey, we, we want customers to be able to get started quickly, like we don't want to have to wait for, you know, potentially 14 days for your background check to come back. Like, can we get them started? 

And she was like, no, there's risk to the business, right? But what was really great was she still also was customer-obsessed and she understood that her answer was going to create a negative customer experience. And so we really worked with her to be like, instead of just saying, no, like, what levers would make you feel comfortable for the business to enable this to happen?

And so you sort of dig and dig and say, like, okay, we hear you. It's too much of a risk. But what isn't a risk? Like, you know, maybe we underwrite them for 14 days. Maybe we underwrite them for 30 days. Maybe there's a cap on how much they can use or manage or whatever. The types of products they can attach to until they've been approved for their background.

And she was awesome. She basically was like, ‘Here's the risk mitigations that I want. Here are my requirements. And I will be okay if you can meet these requirements for these types of customers and these types of customers and these types of customers’. And we were like, ‘Great. Awesome. I love it’. 

So I would just say, like, understanding why, like, empathizing with your stakeholders is like job number one, right? Because when they say no, they're not saying no to be a jerk. They're saying no, because they own a different portion of the business and they're concerned about the customer activities that you're suggesting, so you kind of have to get to root cause and be like, but why does that bother you? Can we work through this? Like, let's figure it out. 

And in, I would say most of the engagements I've ever had, if you have empathy and you try to solve their problems for them, right? Like you can get to a place that you can create a customer experience that makes a lot of sense for everyone involved. But that was a change moment where, you know, we were like, we want this to happen, let's make it happen. And, you know, initially she was like, the risk is off the charts, right?So, empathy is a good start. 

[00:36:31] Scott: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it sounds like the way you approach it was the way that, you know, good product management happens, right?

It's like, dig one layer deeper. It's like, let's collaboratively solve this, even though it's maybe an, you know, to start an internal problem, but then it quickly, like, you know, cascades into like, how do we make this the customer experience? And it sounds like in a very real way, Atlassian and Twilio, it's like, everyone's kind of organized around like we want the business to be successful and and it kind of provides this like like centralizing kind of focus function for for you to have these conversations really well.

[00:37:07] Vina: Yeah 

[00:37:08] Scott: I would love to hear a little career advice. Again, you've worked at some of the best, you know, from my perspective, like, companies that have figured out the commercialization monetization better than almost all companies that like Twilio, Atlassian are companies that I personally study.

So what's advice for someone who's maybe in a role in billing, maybe they're an earlier career billing PM, assuming they want to continue on in that path. Like what's your advice for building up the expertise and kind of skills required to kind of be an excellent version of that?

[00:37:41] Vina: Maybe one of the things that I think about, and I sort of think this is true in general for product managers, but is very, very real for billing product managers in that I feel like people should chase problems and not worry about their ownership domain, right? Like, I'll give you an example where I've seen product managers that, you know, they go to a monthly billing support call where billing support will like itemize the problems that they're seeing customer problems that they're seeing and product managers are like, ‘Not my problem, not my problem, not my problem. Oh, that one fits into my domain’, right? Like, I'm going to pick that one up. And then I've seen other product managers that are like, why, why did that? I don't understand. I don't understand why that could happen. And so there's this aspect of curiosity. There's an aspect of empathy for the customer and for the support organization, and they just want to solve problems.

And whether they're able to solve them or not, they're like curious enough and figure out how to pick up what they can pick up based on, you know, other things drawing on their time. I would just say, learn as much as possible. Be curious, learn as much as possible because, like I said, a really successful billing Product manager has to understand the other domains. That conversation that I was just talking about with that finance leader from Atlassian? We wouldn't have been able to have that conversation if we didn't understand her domain requirements, right? Like what makes you so uncomfortable? Like, where is that risk? Let's talk about it. And we even suggested because we understood well, couldn't we underwrite them? Couldn't we give them, you know, 1,000 and we'll cap them or whatever, right? 

And we made those recommendations because we've sort of worked in their space. We've solved problems for them before, and we kind of know how they think. And you have to extend beyond your…assuming you're early in your career, your small level of ownership that you have now, like, pick up as much as you can, learn about other people's problems, solve problems for other people's, people love people that solve problems for them, right?

Like, and then it's both a good thing and a bad thing, because then you become like a SME, everyone comes to you, but at the same time, you're so valued by our peers in your organization, and it will quickly mean success for you and your career in that role for sure. 

[00:40:01] Scott: Very cool. One related question would be, let's say that, like, there's an executive or a founder listening to this and they have a billing team, but they, you know, they probably don't have a team… you know, maybe they haven't created the perfect environment for, for like, like the Atlassian, the Twilio side where we're billing is an empowered organization. What's like one either thought or piece of advice you'd want them to take away for how to kind of set your billing team up for success going forward.

Like what's, you know, something either that you've observed in that they do maybe subconsciously or ways of kind of making sure that the billing team is actually empowered to go solve all the multifaceted problems that are in front of them?

[00:40:45] Vina: I've never been a founder, so I can only surmise what it must be like.

And I'm sure you know, dive deep is gotta be number two on a founder's list and being able to still understand and dive deep into problems, but allow others to help solve them and still be a participant in that problem solving, but maybe not be the owner of it all the time is probably where I would start. Allow people to make recommendations and think about the customer and the value you'll get from both the organization solving problems will be much faster than you just making a decision. And maybe that decision is random, right? Like, maybe that decision is based on gut feel, which is good, right?

Like founders have great gut feel. Assuming or, you know, understanding that they have a level of success that they have based on that gut feel. But also, it's why you have other people helping you too, right? Like you need help because you can't do it all. So I would just say think about how you can 10X your organization by empowering other people, specifically your billing team to solve problems for sales, for finance, for the customer. And then you could still dive deep. You could still be the owner. You could still be the decider, but let them make those recommendations.

And then maybe the other thing, which is less tactical and more cultural, they'll be happier, right? Like the people want ownership, like they will love you. They will love your company if you give them the opportunity to fail and you give them the opportunity to think about the problems themselves, even if you don't choose the recommendations that they offer. Like you will really espouse a culture that will pay itself back if you, you give them the opportunity to fail. So I would say those two things. 

[00:42:42] Scott: Awesome. Well, I realized we're drawing toward the end. I just have a few last questions that are more quick hits. So one question I'm super curious about, especially because, you know, Twilio is…You know, you're working with Segment, you have a lot of like, really in like innovative products, but also product lines that have been around for a while. What are you most excited about with AI with respect to the products that you're supporting? 

[00:43:09] Vina: Yeah. We've talked about this and we started to see some of it come to fruition and we'll see more come to market in 2025, but being able to combine those two things, which is the intelligence that Segment brings to our communications business and be able to allow our customers be able to touch their customers at the right time in the right channel, right?

Like being able to say Vina wants to talk to you on WhatsApp instead of SMS, or she prefers a voice call, like maybe you should send a voice call instead. Those types of things are the power of what Twilio will provide our customers in addition to, you know, telecommunications, but intelligent telecommunications, I think is exciting.

And you're sort of seeing some of that in the industry today. I don't know if you've received sort of a branded text message. The other day, my prescription from Walgreens texted me, and I used to just get a text list that was like, ‘Hey, your prescription is ready. Here's the short link’.

But at the top of the text message, there was trust. Like I got a logo that very clearly showed me, ‘Hey, this really is coming from, you know, from Walgreens’. And your prescription is ready and, and trust is really great, you know, especially when it comes to communications. And I think all of these things, trust and AI are all the things that Twilio offers our customers and, we're starting… we're just getting started, so I'm, I'm excited for 2025 for sure.

[00:44:39] Scott: Very cool. Since you follow all the trends and monetization commercialization models, I'm curious your read on what are the most exciting commercialization or monetization trends that you're seeing in the industry, you know, maybe agents, maybe outcome-based pricing. I'm really curious what you're following with what's most exciting to you?

[00:44:59] Vina: I think outcome-based pricing is probably like AI agents are great, right? Like, they solve a problem in sales and support and you could have them... obviously, recommendations has been in the consumer space for forever, and so all of these things are not unknown ideas, but outcome-based pricing, I think would be a challenge. And very interesting specifically in the Twilio realm, right? Like, how do you know if somebody took action on your SMS, right? And then how do you price for that, right? So those types of things are super exciting. I think as we think about driving true value for customers and being able to measure true value and be able to price in true value. It's like mind blowing to me.

[00:45:45] Scott: Awesome. Yeah, I'm very excited about it. And I do think, like, just to do a plug for your way of working, I do think the only way you're going to ever be able to capture the value or properly model the value is if you center the end customer in how you do this stuff. Like whenever there's these new kind of billing, pricing, commercialization models, a deep understanding of the customer and how they perceive and receive value is like incredibly critical in order for it to work.

[00:46:13] Vina: Yeah, totally. 

[00:46:14] Scott: Awesome. One last question. It's a general question, but what is one trend that you are super interested in technology? What's the one thing that you're like most excited about it disrupting? 

[00:46:28] Vina: The one thing that's coming to my mind is because I'm arguing with my brother about this, which is not answering your question, and I understand it, is crypto. We keep arguing about the value of crypto and infrastructure and, you know, all of that. So, you know, there's been obviously been this hype around it.

And I live on the traditional finance side of the world where I'm like, I don't understand it. It's not pegged to anything like, payments move without infrastructure. That wasn't answering your question, but that's what came to mind. I think in 

[00:46:57] Scott: Aww, well 2025 is apparently the year of crypto. I love it. 

[00:47:02] Vina: I know, I know. I don't understand it. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm too old. I don't get it . 

Trends? I think in billing it is maybe. I've been to a couple of conferences lately and I do see a little bit of less being finance-oriented. Maybe it's from startups like Metronome where this is coming from, where it's not about like the finance person and the accountant so much. There's still a large conversation that's driving a lot of the conversation.

But as we start to look at billing, I think usage in general, is going to, you know, as you think about usage, usage is actually driving customer experience. You can't pull usage apart from a customer experience like you can assess software experience, and as usage becomes more of a mainstay and how people want to charge for their products, I think it will just become more of a product experience and less of a finance function. 

[00:48:00] Scott: Well, I hope you're right. I think you are right. And I really appreciate all of the time. You're truly an expert in this stuff and really appreciate all the learning that you've shared with us. And I hope to talk to you again soon. 

[00:48:11] Vina: Yeah, this was fun. Thanks so much. 

[00:48:13] OUTRO: Thanks for tuning into this episode of unpacked pricing. If you enjoyed it, we really appreciate you sharing it with a friend. We'd also love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at scott at Metronome. com with feedback and suggestions for who you'd like to see on a future podcast.