Revamping Trello’s pricing and packaging
I spent a year leading a cross-team effort to update Trello’s pricing and packaging offerings. This incredibly complex initiative introduced a new low-cost pricing tier, renamed our higher cost tier, and sunset our solo-use offering. We also redistributed features across our tiers and experimented with the impact of these changes to mitigate risk.
📰 See ZDNET’s Trello adds new free features and introduces new tier for small businesses.
I started this initiative leading product design, then transitioned into a product manager role halfway through.
This resulted in an increase in free trials and paid enabled users, customers taking to Twitter in celebration, over 15 press stories globally, and greater integration into the Atlassian suite.
The problem
My role, as both a designer and product manager, was to guide the team towards solutions that sat at the intersection of the following three problems:
Business problem
Trello’s paid conversion rates were down. They lagged internal objectives and those of competitors.
Customer problem
Trello’s pricing options were confusing and sparse, leaving many customers frustrated and lacking a compelling option.
Strategic problem
Trello’s existing packaging strayed from the overall Atlassian editions framework, making the cross-sell experience harder.
A principled approach
As part of a kickoff workshop, I led my team through an exercise to form principles that would guide decisions and prioritization for the rest of this initiative.
After the kickoff workshop I documented and socialized this set of guiding principles, and kept them centered during conversations surrounding decisions and prioritization.
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Clear and simple. Both prospective customers and current users can come to a quick understanding of who each tier is for and which tier is right for them. The features and limits of each tier are obvious (“I know what I’ll be getting with this upgrade.”) and help tell a story of a team’s progression and growth through Trello. Upgrade paths are obvious both in and out of product.
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The story we tell through the tier progression inspires upgrades. Teams from the customer segments we identify for each tier feel like it’s a “no brainer” to purchase the tier that’s right for them (and continue up the funnel as they grow).
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One of Atlassian’s values is “Don’t f*ck the customer.” Teams feel the value they get out of their paid tier is worth the price. Any limits feel fair and natural for a workplace SaaS tool and align with a team’s growth and complexity needs.
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When teams are evaluating tools for productivity and project management, Trello is a top contender both in terms of pricing and features. Our offerings are on par with competitors in many ways, with a strong set of asymmetric advantages.
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All features in a tier work seamlessly together for the intended customer segments. Growth from one tier to the next is efficient and harmonious. Internally, projects to accomplish work related to pricing and packaging are well connected and in sync.
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We are optimizing for long term success, which may not have immediate or short term payoffs. This is a risk we’re willing to take in order to set us up for the ideal future state.
Trello editions framework
These problems were longstanding and already well research, we were able to create a data-informed strawperson framework to inform our “willingness to pay” experimentation efforts. This editions framework was developed by business modeling, analyzing insights from customer sentiment feedback, competitive research, and consistency with other Atlassian products.
Trello’s pricing options were obviously lacking when compared with other Atlassian products and close competitors. At a glance, it was easy to feel like other products had more to offer.
Our editions framework guided our thinking as we prepared for experimentation.
Assessing risk through experimentation
We knew Trello was lacking a more affordable tier between our free offering and our only self-serve paid tier, Premium. It was clear we should offer a new Standard edition, but we didn’t want to introduce a new cheaper offering to the detriment of annual recurring revenue.
I collaborated with our data analyst and strategic business operations (SBO) to launch an experiment testing our hypothesis about what Trello’s new Standard tier should offer compared with the higher priced Premium offering.
I created this screenflow visualization to help the team identify which areas of the current experience we should target for our experiment.
In places where users could previously only upgrade to Business Class, we experimented with showing a full plan comparison with the new Standard option. This shows the design work I did that we shipped in the experiment to our in-product upgrade experience.
Improving the upgrade experience under tight constraints
Taking on a high level of complexity requires embracing tight constraints. Trello was going from one self-serve paid tier to two, which presented a world of both front and back end challenges. Due to the immense lift behind this work, our team was left with very little bandwidth to make changes to the UI. We also decided to limit scope to offering free trials for only our Premium tier, not the new Standard tier.
Prompts for upgrading needed to be clear, compelling, and contextual. I audited existing prompts and components that were part of the upgrade workflow and mapped how they connected together.
I identified where we’d keep existing upgrade calls to action and where we would need to build new ones.
Here is an example of a simple plan comparison modal where we embraced our constraints of front-end bandwidth and made the most of existing components, focusing on tweaking content and style to highlight our new offerings.
Impact
Increase in paid enabled users (PEU)
With an estimated 10-20% higher new PEUs. The purchase rate for Standard was around 20-25% of new self-serve entitlements, proving our experiment correct that it would not “cannibalize” our Premium offering.
Decrease in churn
The rate at which Trello Premium customers churned decreased after launch, and Trello Standard customers churned at a significantly lower rate than Premium.
Improvement in customer sentiment
In quarterly customer satisfaction reports (HaTS), frustration with Trello’s pricing and packaging model started to recover.
Big splash during go-to-market
We saw a huge uptick in marketing page views, with over 50% of viewers in the first week being new users.
Additionally, this release was highlighted in 18 press stories globally, 12 of which were in tier 1 outlets, including VentureBeat, Computer World, Yahoo! Japan, and more.
Success in sunsetting old offerings
To our surprise, a much larger percentage than expected of our Trello Gold users (the solo-use plan we sunset) and customers on our legacy Business Class plans converted to the discounted Premium plans that we offered.
My favorite result of this initiative may have been the Tweets from excited customers:
Feedback
This initiative has been a career highlight. I was proud to have led in both a design and product capacity, and that my performance was well received by my collaborators and colleagues.