Context

• Intercom hired me to redesign its pricing page.
• Customers were confused by the existing pricing page.
• Intercom also wanted to add new plans and add-ons to the pricing page, but the current design would break with those additions.
• Collaborated with illustrators and brand designers for assets.

Challenges

• Tribal knowledge. This page had a long history of changes, so it felt like everything had been tried--but nothing seemed to work.
• Timeline. With a major product launch coming in 6 weeks, a new pricing page needed to be ready to go.
• Vague decision making structure. Who ultimately owned what happened with the page? Marketing? Product? It wasn't clear. That made decisions more difficult.

Approach

• Invite stakeholders in. Sales, Marketing, Design, Product, Engineering: the pricing page was a critical moment for all of these teams. Over 60% of users signed up from the pricing page. We had to get it right. Inviting these teams to collaborate with me generated early buy-in .

• Synthesize what we know. The pricing page had 8 years of history. To understand the reservations the leadership team had about certain ideas, I had to dig into why old decisions were made and the contemporaneous customer research.
• Make my own conclusions. When in doubt, talk to users. I did, quite a bit.

Outcomes

• The main goal of this project was to unblock 3 key initiatives: creating an enterprise plan, running an experiment on a free plan, and creating add-ons. This design unblocked product launches for all 3 of those experiments.
• The secondary goal was to hold performance steady, but of course we wanted to do better than that.The first invoice ARPA--Average Revenue Per Account--was the key metric this team was measured by. It went up by 26% in this redesign.

• It's not quite as good as it sounds: we got people to add more things to their cart, but then churn also went up. The overall revenue effect was positive, but not as big a win as we initially thought.
• Some of the headwinds were regional: Intercom charged the same price in all geographies. In digging into the data, my PM partner realized that in some markets, people had a higher willingness to pay (like in the US). In other markets, they were more price sensitive (eg, emerging markets).

Additional projects

Intercom retained me after the initial launch to continue supporting the ways that people buy Intercom. A lot of that was work supporting particular launches and small variations in performance. These included:

Redesigning the startup signup flow

Intercom has a special signup for startups where they can apply for a big discount. The problem? The flow was complicated. After a startup would apply, they would have to wait to get a verdict before they could start playing around with the product.

The biggest decision I made was to let applicants use the product right away, even if they weren't approved for special pricing. Since most would eventually be approved, I wanted them to start setting up the product right away. That decision sounds simple, but it took a lot of stakeholder buy-in from a variety of teams.

That decision, plus some general cleanup, led to a 9% increase in the number of signups we received.

Creating pricing migrations

How do we make it clear that prices will change? In the past, Intercom hadn't handled this well. Part of the reason? There were a lot of back-end implications for every change we made since this touched the global billing system. I updated this design system, simplifying the amount of information we tried to communicate in one page. Though you're only seeing one case here, there were dozens of potential cases to consider.

So what were the impact of these changes? Mostly it's about what didn't happen: we didn't see evidence that users were confused when the pricing changes went through. The churn held well below our predictions. Sometimes no news is the best news of all.

Rebranding the core flow

Intercom hired a rebranding agency to get a new corporate identity. I applied the rebrand to the signup experience. Illustrations came from other designers. The layout of the pages below I proposed. Some illustrations below were placeholders, but you can view a live version of the page here.

Takeaways

• Empower your team. My team, because so much revenue flowed through it, was always getting pulled one way or another. Designers need to make it obvious to other stakeholders that changing priorities frequently is expensive. This work changed how I influence my clients to set up teams and set up teams for success in the future.
• Involve others early. My biggest wins came from bringing people into the process who are often ignored: sales associates, customer success, and engineers. They all work harder on a project when they're involved in making the decisions.
• To cut through the noise, talk to customers. On teams with a rich history of product changes, it's hard to tell whether the things that were tried before were the best version of that idea or not. Talk to customers to see if they experience the idea as fresh--even if the organization doesn't.