Reading a price testing report

It opens with a recommendation

The first card in What Matters Most merges three things: the top-line read, the recommended price tiers, and a recommended go-to-market. It hands you a number before it hands you the evidence, which is why the caveat below it matters.

Treat it as a starting range rather than an answer. The question below on taking a price straight to a pricing page is the one to read before you act on it.

The 30-second decision table

Under the recommendation, three columns: the suggested change, why, and what to do next. Each suggested change carries a small category tag above it naming the lever it pulls. The table is derived from the same plan that drives the What’s Next section further down, so the two never disagree. This is the block to screenshot for a pricing conversation.

The caveat is generated

The note under the learnings looks like boilerplate and isn’t. It is written for your run, reflecting the overall confidence and any failure states the study hit, so a thin run gets a more cautious note than a clean one. Read it. It is the fastest signal of how hard you can lean on the numbers above it.

Findings: the chart and the reads

Two blocks. The findings, one by one is the written read on each price point. Where willingness to pay lands plots the per-persona spread as a chart, which is the fastest way to see whether your number sits inside or outside the range people named.

Read the spread rather than the midpoint. A tight cluster and a wide scatter with the same average mean very different things: the first is a price the market agrees on, the second is a market that should probably be tiered.

What’s Next

The third section is titled What’s Next here rather than Next Steps. Each step carries the detail, a tangible test format so you know how to run it, and, where one step depends on another, a callout saying it is conditional on the earlier step.

These steps are framed as tests to run rather than findings to revisit, so they don’t carry links back to individual findings.

The appendix is where the arguments live

The price-testing appendix is a long one. Go here when you need to explain a number to someone else.

• Segment-by-segment price detail, and How prices landed across the audience, which is a table rather than a chart.
• What the audience compared the price against. The anchors, split into ones two or more personas shared and ones specific to a segment. A shared anchor is usually the real competitor, whatever your competitive analysis says.
• What people say they’d pay versus what they’d actually pay. Often the most useful gap in the report.
• Where value didn’t match the price, and how the going-in assumptions held up.
• How the concepts compared, when the run was comparative, and where the audience disagreed with itself. Pricing several concepts does not guarantee this section: if fewer than about three in five personas saw two or more concepts, the run is treated as monadic and the comparison is dropped.

Where to go next

• Reading a synthesis report for the shared sections and confidence levels
• Reading a concept testing report for the type to run before you price anything
• Choosing an interview type