Why customers use more, pay less, and what leaders must design instead
For a long time, progress felt obvious.
Product teams shipped faster. Backlogs flowed. Discovery became continuous. Usage climbed. Dashboards filled with signals that the organization was doing the right things, in the right way.
And for a while, that was enough.
Recently, though, a different tension has started to surface. Despite all that visible progress, leaders are finding it harder to explain where real value is being created. Even more uncomfortable: customers are using more of the product, but pricing conversations are getting tougher, not easier.
Those two facts shouldn’t coexist. Yet they increasingly do.
What’s happening isn’t a failure of execution. In most organizations, delivery is no longer the constraint. Teams know how to ship, learn, and measure. The organization is very good at movement.
The problem is what that movement is assumed to mean.
Over time, many product organizations optimized relentlessly for adoption, engagement, and feature expansion. The implicit belief was simple: if usage keeps increasing, value and pricing power will eventually follow.
Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t.
Usage is a signal, not a value model. Customers can use more of a product every day without experiencing a change significant enough to justify paying more to preserve it. When that happens, pricing power doesn’t disappear overnight. It erodes quietly, masked by growth, renewals, and activity, until someone finally asks for it back.
That moment is arriving now.
Pressure from boards and private equity to optimize pricing and margins hasn’t created this problem. It has revealed it. Pricing conversations force organizations to articulate value explicitly, often for the first time. What feels like price resistance is frequently a delayed reckoning with economic ambiguity.
When outcomes disappoint, leaders tend to respond by refining OKRs, adding outcome metrics, or asking teams to tie work more directly to business impact. When pricing comes under pressure, the response shifts to tighter discount controls, stronger sales messaging, or more aggressive defense of price points.
These moves feel rational. They’re also insufficient. Metrics and pricing don’t create meaning. They reflect it.
If the organization never made explicit how product activity turns into differentiated customer value and how that value turns into durable profit, no amount of measurement or commercial discipline can compensate. You end up optimizing execution inside a model that was never fully defined.
This is where the real issue sits.
At Applied Frameworks, we see this as an economic design problem, not a pricing problem. Product metrics answer one question: Is the organization moving? Pricing power answers another: Does the organization understand what that movement is worth?
When those answers drift apart, it’s because no one clearly designed how value is created, where it is concentrated, and how profit streams should capture that asymmetry. Usage increases. Metrics improve. But value remains conceptually vague.
Organizations that avoid this trap don’t rely on better dashboards or sharper pricing tactics. They do quieter, harder work.
They define value before measuring it. They design profit streams intentionally rather than inheriting them. And they help product teams understand not just what to build, but why that work should matter economically.
In those environments, metrics become trustworthy because they reflect a shared value logic. Pricing becomes defensible because it is grounded in how customers actually experience and preserve value. Product teams gain clarity rather than pressure, because they are operating inside an explicit economic design.
This requires a subtle but important shift in leadership.
The job is no longer to demand better outcomes or defend higher prices. It is to ensure the organization can clearly answer a single question: How does what we build turn into value someone is willing to pay to preserve?
When that logic is explicit, improvement compounds. When it isn’t, improvement only increases exposure.
Product metrics didn’t fail. Usage didn’t fail. Pricing didn’t fail.
They simply matured faster than the organization’s economic design.
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Applied Frameworks
Helping leaders design how product work becomes economic value