Pricing strategy encourages us to find islands of price where the market participants talk only among themselves. They don’t talk to people on other islands. This lets us price each island differently, so we can optimize our revenues. We, unfortunately, don’t break our markets down to island granularity. We average.

You might thing, hey, get with the market research, but we create averaged functionality as well, so we are stuck with an average market. Does the requirements elicitor or user story writer really know the difference between a traditional cost accountant, an ABC cost accountant, and a throughput cost accountant? Even in an IT shop you have this problem, because a department hires people over time, and people over time take up different methods within their domain. Developers don’t have mechanisms to deal with these paradigmatic boundaries even if market research could see the difference. Then again, sorting these islands out would still be a matter of which camp the boss is in, and his boss, and his boss. It gets messy quick enough. The same functional unit in different companies will likewise select its preferences, so at both the customer and the market level there are unrecognized islands spanning all aspects of the offer.

A price filters. A requirements filters.

As for the company with the never before seen functionality, the radical innovation, free works provided and only if there are market barriers, and only if the company is a primary vendor, not a complement, and really wants to win the race to be the market leader. It doesn’t work for consumer goods. It doesn’t work for SaaS, because SaaS, ideally, wouldn’t have exit barriers or large entry barriers in the sense of having to learn a lot before you can use it.

Deaverage. Deaverage, particularly now, in the recession, in the late market, in the consumer market. Find those islands of requirements and user stories. Find those islands of price. Find the island with the gold mine.