Madhavan Ramanujam
Managing Partner & Investor at 49 Palms Ventures (formerly Simon-Kucher)
Madhavan Ramanujam is the author of Monetizing Innovation and Scaling Innovation, former managing partner at Simon-Kucher, now investing full-time in early-stage AI companies through his fund 49 Palms Ventures.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Madhavan Ramanujam makes the case that pricing should be a core part of product development from day one, not an afterthought. Drawing on his work with 250+ companies, he explains why willingness-to-pay conversations should drive roadmap prioritization, how 72% of innovations fail because companies skip these conversations, and why pricing belongs in the product function.
Leadership Principles
- → You cannot prioritize a product roadmap without having willingness to pay conversations
- → Price before product — have the monetization conversation much earlier than you think
- → Pricing should sit in the product function, not finance or sales
Notable Quotes
"When we think about price, we think about it as a measure. Like liter is a measure of volume, price is a measure of value."
— Reframing pricing from a dollar figure to a measure of customer value
"You cannot prioritize a product roadmap without having a willingness to pay conversation. If you're just prioritizing based on what you think or feel, you're getting it wrong."
— His core argument for why pricing research should inform product prioritization
"20% of what you build drives 80% of the willingness to pay. If you don't know this, you're probably over-indexing on the wrong things."
— On the Pareto principle applied to feature prioritization and willingness to pay
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