Come Decidere Cosa Sviluppare Davvero 🧠 Il Product Management con Eugenio di Smart Pricing

Summary (business / product management focus)

Smart pricing (Italian B2B SaaS in hospitality) explains how they decide what to build, translate customer insights into product bets, and prioritize using a lightweight but repeatable scoring/ranking process. They also describe an evolution from a single revenue-management product into a broader platform suite.

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Product strategy & direction

• North-star objectives (annual) drive idea selection.
• Evolving product scope:
  • Origin: Revenue Management System (pricing automation for hospitality)
  • Shift: from a “point solution” to a “platform suite”
  • Launching a second product (already launched), positioned as part of an expanding suite
• Internationalization is a major initiative, with ongoing tuning to standardize while adapting to local customer needs.

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Product discovery & customer/market learning process

They emphasize a Discovery → refinement → feature shaping → continuous delivery cycle.

Insight discovery inputs (unstructured → structured)

• Start unstructured through direct customer contact (“getting in touch with customers” / listening to voice of customer).
• Translate what customers express into what the revenue-management product/data can validate.
• Use additional external research to confirm emerging trends.

New product discovery outcome: “CRM + automation” positioning

The new product is framed as:

• CRM for hoteliers
• Automation for marketing (beyond a static CRM)

Core opportunity framing:

• Hotels lose opportunities because they focus primarily on operations.
• Smart pricing targets direct / non-intermediated bookings and helps hotels activate their own customer base.

Concrete product capabilities described

• Stay-in / pre-arrival and post-stay awareness
  • Proposals/services timed to customer journey moments (pre-arrival, post-stay)
• Marketplace as an e-commerce layer
  • Lists additional services (e.g., bike rental, experiences) for structures that may lack robust reception-based service
  • Especially relevant for residences / property managers
  • Designed for distributed properties without a central info desk

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How they decide what to build (prioritization playbook)

They combine company objectives + impact scoring + effort, while explicitly acknowledging it’s not fully scientific.

Annual objectives → idea ranking (1–5 scale)

• The company sets annual “corporate North Stars” (examples mentioned conceptually):
  • Drive more sales outside Italy
  • Keep churn (CHN) below a threshold
• For each idea, they estimate:
  • Impact on a 1–5 scale
  • Effort on the same 1–5 scale
  • Insights confidence/signal strength on a 1–5 scale
• Ranking mechanism = Impact + Effort + Insights

Notable principles

• Product management is treated as “an art”: data matters, but instinct, out-of-the-box thinking, and educated guesses are essential.
• They work to add more rigor over time, while preventing “anyone could do it” product thinking.

Discovery governance (continuous reassessment)

• They use continuous checkpoints rather than purely quarter-based batching:
  • Stakeholder check-ins (including customer experience / sales perspectives)
  • Product team continuously refines and updates the ranking/score
• Even committed quarter initiatives can be reprioritized when something higher priority emerges.

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End-to-end workflow (from idea to delivery)

Idea refinement and shaping

• Use an idea generation board:
  • Ideas start rough, then product people refine them into clearer feature concepts
• Create proofs of concept / wireframes (even on paper) to test meaning and scope.

Discovery phase validation (“de-risking”)

Discovery is used to set boundaries and avoid building the wrong thing.

Typical discovery activities include:

• Sessions with product (and sometimes technical teams) to understand:
  • Interactions with existing systems
  • Scope and required change management
• Customer confirmation interviews
• Checking competitor approaches and market equivalents
• Producing wireframes primarily to estimate:
  • Development effort
  • Development cost

Effort/cost balance & release splitting

• They try to avoid huge roadmap items by splitting large initiatives into multiple releases.
• If something is “worth five effort,” discovery helps determine what parts can be standalone.

Delivery feedback loop (“measure after release”)

They practice a “fail-fix it” style:

• Avoid committing to enormous builds without feedback.
• After release, feedback triggers further refinement and prioritization updates.

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Metrics, KPIs, and how impact is measured

Product/customer metrics they monitor

• Adoption (tracked company-wide; called out as important)
• Company-wide NPS
• Churn (referred to as “CH rate” and used in objective framing)
• Customer satisfaction trends
  • They look for patterns in feedback and correlate issues such as onboarding gaps

Sales/marketing funnel outcome metrics (example)

In targeted campaigns, they observed:

• Higher quality prospects
• Better conversion rate
• Engaged arrivals already aligned with their target profile

Risk/decision quality improvements

• Discovery reduces unknowns earlier than before, making risks clearer and decisions more reliable.

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Team structure & resourcing (operating model)

• ~50 people total at Smart pricing
• Roles are distinguished, with capacity described roughly as:
  • Product + tech combined delivery team ~20 people (approx.)
  • Engineering is organized into teams; six people are referenced in engineering context
  • Data science / AI specialists support backend core and integration features
• Product org roles include:
  • Product management
  • Product design
  • QA
• Engineering supports:
  • Backend core
  • Integrations
  • Integration-specific features

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Concrete “case-style” example of a product-growth initiative

Free Market Intelligence tool (web app origin → embedded into product)

• Started outside the core product/engineering group as a data-side web app (a fast internal tool).
• Later, the product team redesigned it for UX consistency and embedded it into Smart pricing.
• Function:
  • Prospects sign up for free to view competitors/trends monitoring
  • Provides scores and highlights competitor strategy deviations (trend-level, not room-level static prices)
• Impact observed:
  • Higher prospect quality
  • Better conversion rates for targeted campaigns

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Future challenges (high-level business execution)

• Internationalization without going “full throttle”
  • Choose the right countries/strategies
  • Validate that the “platform solution” vision achieves market fit (especially with the second product and what comes next)
• Blue Ocean thesis (high level):
  • Revenue management exists, but many hotels price mostly by instinct
  • Smart pricing believes there is still room for:
    • improvements even where tools already exist
    • solutions that reduce hotel obstacles and demonstrate value

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Presenters / sources

• Eugenio — CTO & co-founder, Smart pricing
• Interviewer / moderator — name not clearly provided (the host is addressed as “Bello” in subtitles earlier, but no presenter name is explicitly stated)