Strategic Pricing Lead

We are currently seeking a Strategic Pricing Lead. This role owns the monetisation architecture of the ARIS portfolio — what is sold together, how it is metered, what it costs at list, how far it may be discounted and how prices move over time — and turns that architecture into a price book, guardrails and tools the field can sell with.

This is a transformation role first: in its first 12–18 months the Pricing Lead redesigns the SKU structure end to end — from value metric and packaging to price book, quoting and the migration of existing customers — and then runs the new structure. The shift towards cloud, AI and agent-based offerings demands a single owner who ensures pricing decisions are made deliberately rather than deal by deal.

The role reports into the Chief Product Officer, with a dotted line to the CFO for margin coverage. The CRO sits on the Pricing Council so the price book stays sellable. The role is neither a deal desk nor a sales role — it sets the system those deals run on, and learns from every exception so the system gets better.

Essential Functions:

• Define the ARIS monetisation strategy with the CPO, CRO and CFO: target price positioning, regional price corridors, the role of each offer in land-and-expand, and the balance between new-logo growth, expansion and margin.
• Design the commercial models ARIS needs for its shift to cloud and AI: subscription, term and consumption models, credits and commitments, and hybrid on-premises/cloud constructs.
• Lead the SKU structure transformation as a programme: assess the current SKU and price list, select the value metric for each offer, define the target architecture of editions, bundles and add-ons, retire legacy and overlapping SKUs, pilot with selected customers or regions before global rollout, and deliver the plan through the Pricing Council.
• Lead the packaging and pricing of AI and agentic capabilities — including on-premises AI bundles, launch AI bundles and the commercial treatment of MCP and agent access — and iterate from MVP on the basis of field and customer evidence.
• Design the migration of the installed base to the new structure, including SKU mapping, grandfathering rules, price protection and customer communication, with Sales and Customer Success.
• Design partner and channel pricing — reseller margins, OEM and embedded models, marketplace listings — and services attach, consistent with the direct price book.
• Establish and run the Pricing Council (CPO, CRO and CFO as standing members) with a clear decision calendar and decision log, and own the price book as the single source of truth for every list price, SKU and packaging change.
• Define the discount, concession and renewal framework: discount bands by segment, deal size and offer, approval levels, give-get rules, escalation thresholds, annual escalators, multi-year price protection and renewal floors.
• Build and own pricing analytics — list-to-net price waterfall, discount distribution, price realisation, win/loss against price, competitor tracking, and structured willingness-to-pay research — and model the revenue, margin and cannibalisation impact of every pricing option before it is decided.
• Act as the escalation point for pricing questions the guardrails do not answer, provide Deal Desk with fast, reasoned views on non-standard structures, and review approved exceptions systematically to decide whether recurring exceptions should become policy.
• Prepare every pricing and packaging launch end to end — price book entries, CPQ set-up, quote templates, contract language, customer communication, and field-facing tools (calculators, packaging guides, value-metric explanations and objection handling) — with Product Marketing, Sales Operations and Enablement.

Minimum Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience in pricing, packaging or monetisation, with at least 4 years in B2B software — in-house at a software vendor or at a specialist pricing consultancy — with price and packaging changes taken to market.
• Strategy grounding: structured, hypothesis-driven problem solving from top-tier consulting, corporate strategy or product strategy; able to frame an ambiguous monetisation question and drive it to a decision.
• Deep understanding of recurring-revenue economics — ARR, NRR, ACV, CAC payback, gross margin — and of how pricing moves each of them.
• Hands-on experience choosing value metrics and designing editions, bundles and add-ons, including transitions from perpetual or on-premises licences to subscription or consumption models.
• Advanced modelling and data skills: price waterfalls, elasticity and scenario models, discount analytics; comfortable with large data sets in Excel, SQL and BI tools.
• Experience designing and interpreting willingness-to-pay research — interviews, conjoint, Van Westendorp — and competitive pricing analysis.
• Commercial realism: understands how enterprise deals are sold, negotiated and approved; designs prices the field can win with, not just prices that look right in a model.
• Credible with C-level stakeholders; able to align Product, Sales and Finance when their interests pull in different directions, and to land decisions.
• Has led at least one end-to-end SKU, packaging or pricing-model transformation at a software company — from design through price book, quoting and migration of existing customers.
• Self-starter mindset: works autonomously and uses existing Product, Finance and Sales Operations capacity rather than building a parallel organisation.
• Explains complex pricing logic simply, in writing and in the room. Fluent business English; additional languages are an advantage.

Nice to Haves:

• MBA or equivalent postgraduate qualification.
• Experience pricing AI, agentic or consumption-based software offerings.
• Experience at an enterprise software vendor in business process management, process mining, enterprise architecture or adjacent automation markets.
• Experience setting up and running a pricing council or equivalent cross-functional pricing governance.
• Experience with CPQ and price-management platforms.
• Experience leading installed-base migrations or large-scale list-price changes.
• Experience with partner, OEM and marketplace pricing models.
• Experience in investor-backed software companies with a strong focus on revenue quality.
• Working knowledge of revenue recognition principles relevant to software pricing (for example IFRS 15).