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Ask the product questions that shape your strategy

What new AI features could be our moat? Is anyone actually making usage pricing work? Ask the questions that decide your quarter and the answer comes back from what the market has already done, with the pricing page, launch or teardown behind every claim.

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Strategy Workspace › Thought partner10,000+ signals
Should we put our AI features in the base tier or behind a paid upgrade?

Across the 113 companies with digitised pricing, 77 sell AI in some form and the split is not what most teams assume. Bundling it into tiers you already have is the most common (32) — Figma gives every seat type on every tier, free plan included, its own monthly credit allowance 3. Usage metering is close behind (27). Gating it behind a paid tier, the option you are asking about, is a distant third at 12.

What the gate looks like when it is used

Slack unlocks its first AI summaries at Pro and adds more at every step above it 4; Atlassian puts Rovo in Standard with nothing in Free 5. Both gate a feature whose cost per use is small and roughly fixed. The metered group looks different — Linear ships its Agent on every tier including Free, then meters the expensive part, with coding sessions and Loops both carrying a “requires AI credits” footnote 1, and Notion bills Custom Agents at $10 per 1,000 monthly credits on top of tier access 2.

What this means for you

The real question is not which tier, it is whether your AI feature has a marginal cost that scales with enthusiasm. Slack’s summaries do not, so a tier gate holds. Linear’s coding sessions do, so a gate would either cap their best users or cost them money — which is why they metered instead. Check your own cost per active user first: if usage is unbounded, a flat tier is a bet on your customers being lazy.

5 sources
1LinearPricing capture · 22 Jul 20262NotionPricing capture · 23 Jul 20263FigmaPricing capture · 22 Jul 20264SlackPricing capture · 22 Jul 20265AtlassianPricing capture · 29 Jul 2026
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Should we move from per-seat to usage pricing?

Across the digitised pricing pages, bundling into existing tiers is the most common approach, with usage metering close behind. The split turns on whether your cost scales with enthusiasm.

LinearNotionFigma+2 sources
Thought partnerAny product strategy question

Ask the questions your strategy depends on

Pricing, positioning, what to stop doing, whether an advantage survives contact with a competitor. Each one is answered from what leading product companies have already tried, and every claim carries the pricing page, launch or teardown it came from.

You take evidence into the room instead of a point of view.

The strategic questions to shape your roadmap

Ask whatever is actually on your mind this quarter — how to price AI, whether to go upmarket, what to stop doing — and get it answered from what leading product companies have already tried, with the pricing pages, launches and teardowns behind it attached. Desk research that used to take a fortnight and a deck now lands in the twenty minutes before the meeting.

Should we move from per-seat to usage pricing?Are we losing on price or on positioning?Where is there uncontested space for us?What could we stop competing on entirely?Are we differentiated, or just different?What would we build if we started today?Which of our assumptions is most out of date?
Build our own AI layer, or partner?Should we go upmarket or deepen the core?Where could we change the rules of our category?What makes us genuinely hard to copy?What would a well-funded new entrant do to us?Which emerging behaviour should we bet on?
What should we stop doing next quarter?Do we charge for AI, or bundle it in?What is everyone in our category getting wrong?What would make a customer switch away from us?What should we build that nobody else is?Where is the market heading that we are not?

Use powerful frameworks to solve your problems

Describe what you are facing and it picks the framework that fits — Jobs to Be Done when a feature request needs reframing, Pre-mortem before a risky bet, Blue Ocean when every deal comes down to discounting — then works your own case through it in a live tool. A structured read on your situation in an afternoon, and reasoning your team can pressure-test rather than a conclusion they have to accept.

Strategy Workspace › Frameworksthe full library
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)Reframes a customer’s need as a “job” they’re hiring your product to do, so you build around the outcome they’re after rather than a feature they happened to ask for.Best forEarly discovery, or any time a feature request needs reframing before you commit to building it.
Continuous DiscoveryBuilds a standing weekly habit of talking to customers alongside delivery, instead of treating research as a one-off phase before building starts.Best forEstablished products where assumptions need regular re-checking rather than a single upfront research pass.
Double DiamondSplits problem-solving into two diverge-then-converge phases — first explore the problem broadly then narrow to the real one, then explore solutions broadly and narrow to the one you build.Best forComplex or ambiguous problems where it isn’t yet obvious what the right question even is.
Opportunity Solution TreeVisually maps a desired outcome down through the opportunities it could unlock, the solutions that address each one, and the experiments that test them — one tree, one line of sight.Best forTeams running continuous discovery who need everyone to see how a given bet actually ladders up to the outcome.

Every framework in the library ships an interactive tool — a canvas, a scoring table, a board or a tree — so you run your own situation through it rather than reading about someone else’s.

It runs the framework, not just names it. Each one ships an interactive tool — a canvas, a scoring table, a board or a tree — so you work your own case through it rather than reading about someone else’s.

Strategy Workspace › Frameworks
Jobs to Be DoneDiscovery
When [situation]…I want to [motivation]…So I can [outcome]
Double DiamondDiscovery
DiscoverDefineDevelopDeliver
Porter's Five ForcesStrategy
Buyer powerSubstitutesIndustry rivalrySupplier powerNew entrants
RICEPrioritization
Reach×Impact×Confidence
Effort
Impact/Effort MatrixDecision-making
ImpactQuick winsMajor projectsFill-insThankless tasksEffort
Opportunity Solution TreeDiscovery
Desired outcome
Opportunity ASolution 1Solution 2Opportunity BSolution 3

Each one is drawn, not described. A framework you have never run is legible before you open it, so you can pick the one that fits the problem instead of the one you already know.

Pressure-test a decision before you commit to it

Frame the call, add what you already know, and pick the lenses: a pre-mortem that assumes it failed, a devil’s advocate, a bull case, the second-order effects, and a read of what the market has already tried. It weighs them against each other and leads with a recommendation — so the strongest objection to your decision is one you have already answered, rather than one raised for the first time in the room.

How a decision gets worked

The lenses run against real market data, not just the prompt. Wider market analysis pulls real signals, pricing captures and comparable decisions; every lens also reads your company profile. The synthesis then weighs them against each other before the recommendation is written.

Strategy Workspace › New decision

Decision

Should we meter AI usage or gate it behind a tier?

Context

Our AI cost per active user is unbounded and the top decile already uses 6× the median. Base tier is $12/seat.

Frameworks

Pre-mortemAssumes the decision was made and failed a year later, then works backward to find the most likely cause.Second-order effectsSurfaces knock-on consequences beyond the obvious first-order impact.Devil's advocateBuilds the strongest possible case against making this decision at all.Bull caseBuilds the strongest possible case for making this decision.Wider market analysisGrounds the analysis in what tracked companies are actually doing — signals, pricing pages, and comparable strategic decisions.SynthesisWeighs the other frameworks against each other to find where they agree and where the real tension is.
Apply frameworks

You choose which lenses to apply. Frame the decision, add the context, then pick from six — a pre-mortem when the risk is what worries you, the wider market read when you suspect someone has already tried this.

Strategy Workspace › Decision Maker6 lenses · 5 citations

Should we meter AI usage or gate it behind a tier?

6 lenses applied · grounded in real market data · 5 citations

Recommendation

Meter it. Your AI cost per active user is unbounded and your top decile already uses 6× the median, so a flat tier gate prices for the median and loses money on the users you most want to keep.

Synthesis

The pre-mortem and the devil’s advocate both land on the same failure: a tier gate that has to be re-drawn within two quarters. The bull case survives it, but only under metering.

Pre-mortem

A year from now this failed because heavy users hit the tier ceiling, downgraded their usage rather than their plan, and the feature’s engagement numbers made it look unsuccessful.

Second-order effects

Metering makes usage visible to the customer, which suppresses exploratory use — the thing that drives adoption in month one. Expect a slower ramp and budget for a free allowance.

Devil's advocate

Credits are a second currency your customers have to learn. Both of the metered pages you are modelling on needed a footnote to explain theirs, which is a legibility cost you are choosing to take on.

Bull case

Usage pricing lets you ship the expensive feature to the free tier, where it does the most acquisition work, without the cost scaling with people who were never going to pay.

Wider market analysis

Grounded in real pricing data: of 113 digitised pricing pages, 32 bundle AI into existing tiers and 27 meter it by usage — against 12 that gate it behind a paid tier and 6 that sell it as a separate add-on.

The report leads with the answer. Recommendation first, then the reasoning, then the individual lenses that justify it — so you can act on it in a minute or defend it for an hour.

Learn the frameworks from decisions companies actually made

Each case study takes a decision a company actually made and works it through the frameworks that explain it — what they were betting on, what had to be true for the bet to pay off, and what a pre-mortem or Porter’s Five Forces makes visible about the call. Read a few and the frameworks stop being theory and become something you can run on your own decisions.

Strategy › Case studiesbuilt from real decisions
NetflixBuild, buy & partnerBuying Its Way Into AI Production Instead of Licensing the ToolsNetflix spent $587M to own an AI filmmaking stack rather than rent capability from vendors, betting that production tooling is now core infrastructure, not a commodity service.Porter’s Five Forces · Pre-mortem
MicrosoftProduct portfolioOne Copilot to Rule Them All: Consolidating AI Bets Into a Single PlatformMicrosoft is folding its scattered Copilot products into one unified AI platform for consumers and enterprises alike. The move trades the safety of many small bets for the scale advantages of one dominant surface.Jobs to Be Done · Porter’s Five Forces
VantaProduct portfolioVanta Bets on an AI Agent That Replaces the Compliance Work It Used to Just TrackVanta moved from monitoring compliance evidence to generating it, launching an AI agent that writes audit-ready SOC 2 documentation instead of just helping customers assemble it.Jobs to Be Done · Porter’s Five Forces
HubSpotProduct portfolioPivoting to agentic AI as core product bet amid commoditization riskHubSpot is redirecting serious R&D capital toward proprietary agentic AI (Breeze), betting it can out-compete generic LLMs before its CRM moat commoditizes.Porter’s Five Forces · Lean Canvas
SnapchatProduct portfolioBetting on Glasses: Snapchat Wagers Its Future on AR Hardware, Not SoftwareSnap moved beyond its app to build standalone AR glasses, staking capital and brand on the idea that spatial computing, not the camera feed, is the next platform. It is a costly, multi-year bet with no guaranteed mainstream buyer yet.Porter’s Five Forces · North Star Metric
RobloxProduct portfolioRoblox Bets on a Second Front Door: Creation Without a DesktopRoblox launched Build, a standalone mobile app for making games on the phone, betting that the next wave of creators won't touch a desktop at all. The move trades platform simplicity for reach into a much larger, less technical creator population.Jobs to Be Done · Opportunity Solution Tree

Generated from the Decision Tracker, so the library grows with the market rather than being written once.

Frameworks, applied to decisions that really happened. Each one names the bet, the conditions it depended on, and the frameworks that read it — so you see how a framework behaves on a real call before you use it on one of your own.

Get answers that are personalized to your company

Tell it who you are once and it holds that behind every answer afterwards — what you sell, which tracked companies are genuinely comparable, how you are organised, how your own pricing page scores.

The same question from a 40-person design tool and a 4,000-person enterprise platform comes back with two different answers, each drawn from the companies that one can actually learn from. Advice you can act on directly, instead of translating someone else’s situation into your own.

Your productWhat you sell, to whom, and the model you sell it on
Your categoryWhich of the tracked companies are actually comparable
Your orgTeams, headcount and reporting lines, if you have mapped them
Your homepage and pricingCaptured and scored on the same rubric as everyone else

Every answer still carries its sources, so personalised never means unaccountable — you can see which signals it read about the market, and which facts it used about you.

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