Transcript for "Orb's 2026 Roadmap: Building the Future of Revenue Design": Okay. Seems like we have critical mass, so I'm gonna go ahead and get us started maybe with some quick intros. Hey, folks. I'm Alan Perfect. I'm our product marketing lead here at Orb, and I'm joined today by Alvaro. Hi, everyone. I'm Alvaro, cofounder and CEO at Orb. Super excited to be spending this time together where really what we're gonna be doing is talking to you all, our customers, about all the things that we've learned, developed, and and discovered this year and what our thoughts of of 2026 moving forward are. Sounds great. Yeah. Maybe a quick icebreaker question to start. Alvaro, I know a lot has changed this year for or for our market. I mean, just everything is moving so quickly. Yes. Tell me a little bit about what's changed, what's exciting to you about this year. Yeah. Catch me up. When I think of 2025, probably the the biggest idea that comes to mind is how how mainstream the conversation about pricing has gone in b two b software. So when we think about, how, you know, us with several of you all been talking about some of your goals around pricing, how to think about your revenue as a much more intentional thoughtful design type experience, I feel like this is the year that that conversation has gone from a small tranche of of of early visionaries into really a best practice around software. To me, that's deeply exciting because, one, I think it recognizes and elevates the fact that the AI era economy is being carved out in a much more usage based hybrid or outcome based pricing fashion. Two, I think it elevates the importance and and positioning of a lot of the individuals that are driving the change in their organizations around it. And then three has, I think, made for, a bunch of exciting innovative product that we've been building with with our customers this year. Yeah. And I I can't wait to get into it. I know you have a lot to share product wise. But yeah. I mean, even since I joined, it's been really cool to see the way that the market has kind of grown up and the conversations that elevated from usage based billing to this really big movement around pricing as the strategic lever. It's been amazing to watch. And, I mean, Orb has grown a lot this year. We've, like, we're, like, over double the employee headcount size, like, tripled in revenue. We've been had the pleasure of working with some of the most, you know, exciting leading companies in the industry. Our customers have grown like crazy. I think, really, I just continue to believe that we're at this moment where we're always gonna be underestimating what's possible with AI and just seeing in in every day the kind of deep change that this can have in our lives. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that excitement has been I know it's kind of been this ongoing current at the company. Right? We've been for the past couple months, I feel like talking about what is happening out in the world, what is next for Orb, trying to kind of, call our shot as to what that feature is gonna look like. And I know you and I both have had a lot of conversations with our customers, with folks out in the market, and, like, we both learned some things that have really surprised us. So I would love to hear your perspective. Like, how have those conversations gone? What are some of the kind of compelling insights that you've gathered from all of that? Yeah. I mean, I okay. I continue to be reminded of how deeply cross functional of a discipline pricing is. This is a question I get a lot from our customers, from our prospect. It's, you know, who should own pricing? I asked you that in my interview. I remember. And I think this year has been another testament validation to the fact that the best practices is for this to be a cross functional discipline. So I'm excited about how this year at org, we've gotten the opportunity and privilege to partner deeply with product engineering, finance, accounting, sales, revenue teams very directly at the heart of a lot of their their revenue objectives. And I think the just the cross functional nature of this is something that makes this movement very, very special and unique. Yeah. It's really interesting because I feel like just given the number of different types of people we speak to, we're sort of getting this we're sort of getting two sides of this story. Right? Like, on the one hand, we're speaking with I I feel like a lot of, like, venture capital type folks and and business leaders out in the market who are saying, yeah. We we really wanna see pricing become this strategic lever. We really wanna see our founders come to us with a real strategy for how they're gonna price and reprice as they grow. And And on the other hand, I feel like we're talking to a lot of practitioners across what you're saying, like engineering, product, go to market, finance. And I I think, like, some of the anecdotes there have been surprising as to how under the surface a lot of this just seems like it's starting to feel really messy as pricing scales. And it feels messy in a very unique way. And I think we've gone to a moment of real insight at all this year in talking to our customers and talking to our market in understanding exactly in what shape that that manifests. It's not that in an organization, pricing has no ownership or life. Nobody cares about it. I think everybody at a high gross growth, fast growing SaaS organization knows and recognizes the importance of putting pricing as a strategic discipline. But, unfortunately, when they're when things are not quite in sync or organized, it becomes a little bit disorganized and changes that should be fast and small end up taking months. And this comes from no fault of of any individual or process or system, but really rather about the fact that there has yet to be real infrastructure to help organize a world of pricing. So we've come up with this idea and analogy of the metaphor of a broken relay race of pricing. Where, again, it's like people kind of know that they have a part to play, but the baton keeps getting dropped because rigid systems get in the way or unclear processes stand as the enemy. So I think, we've we've really taken it upon ourselves and and and this year has impressed upon ourselves that Orb's mission is to, like, help fix this broken relay arrays of pricing and really organize the cross functional stakeholders into one cohesive in sync motion. I love I love that visual. But I I hear what you're saying too. Yeah. I think, something that's really stood out to me is I think as the market has sort of leveled up. Right? We've seen the conversation shift from billing to pricing to monetization, which I think has been a really cool maturity moment, for a lot of companies, us included. I think the next layer about that we're starting to hear though is that pricing is actually just so much more complicated than just pricing. A lot of companies kind of take this approach where there's a pricing committee, and they and I mean, we have a pricing and packaging committee even. Right? You kind of get the stakeholders to meet together to solve the problem that is pricing. But as you start to think about that and unbundle that across all of these different functions, right, you start to see pricing, be a lot more complicated under the surface. It has a lot of different moving parts. Can you tell me about those? Well, at at a in a in a in a really deep way, the connection that modern pricing strategies and software have with the product is very deeply intertwined. So what you require is that product and engineering partnership alongside a finance organization being able to marry the context of of business and commercials with the product and and customer value. And I think what we see in in some of our most forward looking customers is that they lean into that cross functional nature and honestly, sometimes cross functional mess there, which is I think they recognize that embedding an accounting team that is the expert on a revenue recognition policy with a product team that is the expert on exactly how the experience manifests in the product. And doing so early enough then in the product development journey is a great recipe of success for for for pulling that off. Yeah. It's been really fascinating. I feel like, in a way there have been some kind of, like, false flag market signals on this. Right? Because I know we all watched right at OpenAI started to hire special project leads for pricing. We started to see kind of more engagement from folks who maybe chiefs of staff, maybe biz ops leaders who are kind of acting as that, like, sole whole problem owner for pricing. And I think we thought for a while that that would that would kind of maybe be the answer, right, that we needed to build, like, a cockpit for this singular pilot who was gonna manage the whole whole, mess that is pricing. But I think, you know, the more that we've spoken to folks out there, it seems like the more people are just really excited to do their part in this relay. Like, everyone wants to run their segment, but maybe it's just that under the surface, they need more ways to just make this work with other folks. And, I think particularly special is some of the conversations we've had with, CFOs on on how they they view their role and responsibility here. And, I mean, for for me, that that's been very special. One, the recognition that there's just an amount of manual and operations work that's plaguing a finance organization from being able to operate at the the level that they want to. But then also the recognition of that cross functional partnership within a very tightly controlled framework to ensure that at the end of the day, billing stays correct. And at the end of the day, those accounting policies get followed. So I I was really curious to remark upon that CFO perspective that that we've seen. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Billing billing must be correct. Yeah. I know, like, I I also spoke to a CFO kind of during that listening tour who was really struggling with, on the one hand, kind of wanting to chart the course for what it looks like to be a modern CFO, right, where he really wants to be deeply involved in all things growth related at the company in a way, kind of wants the CFO to become a growth role. Right? He wants to have his hands in contracting to make sure that they're pricing for profitability. He wants to have his hands in overall pricing strategy. He doesn't just wanna be kind of like a chief accountant. On the other hand, pricing is really technical, and their product is really technical. And he's finding that they actually have to do pricing by committee because of the number of people it takes in the room to say to understand, like, all of the nuances of how this really technical product works and all the value metrics involved, and then to actually implement that downstream in their billing infrastructure. And that to me just feels so evocative and visceral. It reminds me of the experience that I had, working in product and engineering at a at Asana that that led to to us founding this company and just a lot of the experience that I see day to day in our customers. And and, Owen, I think it's that experience that has led us to discover our core truth. And that core truth is that there is a new discipline that is being practiced at companies these days and that that discipline or was calling revenue design. And it's this idea that in order to, streamline pricing into this very in sync, relay race, what you need is the ability to very thoughtfully craft, model, simulate and execute your pricing strategy so that you have a a direct control and command of where you're taking your revenue strategy. And I think we're we're super excited about continuing to to realize that next year. Oh, I love it. I mean, revenue design is amazing dream. I'm on board. But I would love to get to what that actually looks like in practice, you know, talking about collaboration, talking about, like, a world in which we're all gonna work together. We're gonna have all the levers that we need to actually make pricing work. I mean, it it really does sound like what needs to exist in the world, but tell me a little bit more about how we're gonna build it. What what does that look like from a product capabilities perspective? Yeah. And I think it's this combination of making data accessible and available to every team that needs it as well as driving and building collaborative experiences to execute on pricing. So on on the first one, the vision of this company is to create the data platform that can uniquely connect every unit of of of usage to revenue and make it accessible to every team. And in in that, in order for everybody to be able to play their, part in the relay race, financing can't just be blocked on an engineering data pool. An engineering team can't just be sort of thinking about modernization strategy in a vacuum without deep connectivity to the revenue strategy. So I think there's a there's a real element of the kind of unifying data platform that we're building that that will guide teams through that. Mhmm. The second part here is creating the the right collaborative experiences that inform revenue design. So we've been putting a lot of focus this year on, highlighting the experience of executing a price change and launching a new product or changing some of the rates and, you know, and as we as we recap some of the releases this year, we'll be showcasing that. I think we're gonna continue to invest in this area and really identify the fact that in order to fully execute on a pricing strategy, maybe there is a strategy discussion that needs to have happened. There's a data informed review that can be backed by an orb simulation. And then there's an approval chain and and review process that also needs to come into play. And I'm just excited for this company to make that really come alive in in a very tangible workflow. Mhmm. Yeah. You're sort of outlining basically kind of three areas, right, of focus. The one being, how do we sort of bring finance more deeply into this universe of usage based billing, which has historically been a really engineering heavy conversation, which makes sense. It's really infrastructure related. But, yeah, how do we kind of tie that all together into one workflow and make sure that we're not just sort of leaving finance teams scrambling to pick up the pieces? Two being this idea of price changes. How do we make them more collaborative? You know, how do we kind of make this broken relay race actually work? And the third just being the general future of revenue design. Like, what does it mean to do strategic pricing now and in the future? I would love to learn more about what ARC has built this year toward that goal. Yeah. What ARC is building next year. Maybe let's start with the finance folks. How are we helping them? That'd be great. Let's let's kick off our our twenty five year team. Let's do it. Alright. Before we get into it, I wanna take a step back and just recap what we learned in 2025 because I think there were so many great nuggets in that conversation. The first thing I'm hearing from you is usage based billing is starting to become a little bit disruptive to finance teams. Can you tell me about a bit about that? Very much so. I think this is, so much more than just a pricing model shift. This is, in fact, a business transformation where many departments, including finance, have to realign the their workflows and the way that they think about the outlook and help the business around this idea of usage based modernization. And what we see in our work with our customers is that finance teams are really eager and craving technology partners that can be really usage native to their workflows. I love that term. Yeah. Thinking about how we make the finance team that kind of first class citizen in all of this instead of just treating billing as this kind of engineering and scale challenge. Very much so. Very cool. The second thing I'm hearing from you is about how pricing is starting to become this meaningful, competitive, and strategic lever instead of being this back office or once a year kind of process. Tell me a bit more about what, what downstream impacts are coming from that. Yeah. I mean, I think this is really being driven by, the faster rate of change we're seeing industry wide that's propelled and driven by AI. I think businesses these days really have come to realize that the ability to stay competitive and agile in your pricing strategy is can be a huge, competitive advantage for growth. Amazing. And then finally, I know we're starting to see this shift where, usage based monetization is all grown up. Right? As we move from kind of seeing this be largely in PLG hypergrowth companies to being a real enterprise growth lever, I know there's a lot kind of downstream affecting that. Tell me a bit more about what you're seeing there. I'm gonna call 2025 the year of monetization of AI agents in the enterprise. I feel like we've had we've been lucky to work with so many companies that are actively innovating and building new products and thinking actively about how to bring those to market and effective with effective monetization strategies. And this is really the year where as consumers and customers are realizing ROI with, AI, business are also thinking about what's the best way to, align incentives and align value in service of that ROI. It's really exciting stuff. Yeah. And and, you know, I'm particularly excited about how we've been able to build a lot of product experiences around some of these themes. So maybe let me take everyone through what is our 2025 end review, and I'm gonna recap what have been some of the major platform releases that we've been building with you all of you, our customers during this process and connect back to some of these themes as we go. I would say, first and foremost, we've spent a lot of time and a lot of partnership this year with our customers on building a cohesive end to end life cycle around pricing. Really this idea that pricing is not a set it and forget it and forget it exercise. It's like an ongoing iterative experimental business practice. So we spent a lot of time this year, developing and deepening our migrations capability, which enables customers to very seamlessly transition their customers over new new new pricing definitions. And in particular, making it really efficient to support common launch motions like easily launching a new product or a new SKU from our customers. I mentioned also this idea of monetization of AI agents, and probably my favorite release this year was Orb simulations. This is a capability that we actually co developed with several of our customers where we were we were starting to observe that they were using Orb in a little bit of an unusual way. So to tell that story, we were noticing how they were going into the platform. They were sending in a bunch of usage data and setting up shell pricing structures, but not actually billing for them. So we called up a couple to to understand, like, hey. What what's going on? What's happening here? And it turns out that they were running a closed beta for their new AI agent product. And what they, you know, they build an amazing product. They had put together a cohort of early customers. They just did not know how to price it yet. They didn't like this idea of how how do we actually monetize was still very much developing. So what they did is they ran this observation period where they were running real usage data through Orb and trying to model what would what would the revenue strategy look like. So we productize that entire experience across a capability we call simulations that lets you back test or simulate alternate different pricing strategies on top of the actual usage data that your customers are driving. I think this is an incredibly powerful capability for driving some of that experimentation. I love that you put these two together because I think in all of our conversations, right, what's been coming up as a big theme is that our customers kind of feel this competing pressure. On the one hand, they need to be fast. You need to grow. You need to iterate. You need to experiment, and you need to be able to change prices with agility. On the other hand, you need to be strategic. Their boards are giving them pressure to really be data driven about the way they're do pricing doing pricing to present a real strategy, and I I love that you're showing here, right, this ability to simulate pricing, showing that you're being careful, showing that you're being purposeful about what changes you're making and how you're launching. And on the other hand, really dig in and make those changes quickly, execute, iterate, experiment. It gets such a good embodiment of that that shift we're seeing, right, where you need to move like PLG but be careful like an enterprise. Absolutely. And I I've been excited to watch how several of our customers have been being very thoughtful about the rollout strategies here. And when you think about some of the the powerful capabilities in simulations that underpin some these hard questions that our customers asking. These are difficult questions like when you have an AI product that, you know, drives a real cost and and and cogs on your end, how do you make sure that the power users that are getting disproportionate value have also aligned incentives where the monetization strategy is supporting that. So some of our customers have been working through some difficult questions like how many how much of an allocation of credits should I give upfront? What is that gonna mean for a customer's ability to slip into overages or renew early? So these are the kind of strategic questions that we've been excited to see Orb simulations really helped. Right? I'm feeling a follow-up webinar coming on. But show me what's next. Yeah. I mean, what well, this year, we also spent a lot of time thinking about our finance workflows. Like, we talked about how they need a lot of native usage native workflows through it. So this year, we released an accounting period law capability to our financial reporting. This enables an accounting team to granularly control exactly when a period is closed as part of their month end activities and ensure that any follow on, adjustments or backdated contracts that get set up in the billing system don't end up impacting close periods. So I think when you think about an organization's compliance and and month end activities, this capability has been really critical especially to tie in within an ecosystem of solutions. All roads lead back to billing must be correct? They they do indeed. And, and I think we've also wanted to provide and and really create experiences that are very native to finance teams. So that, helped drive our or contract to cash capability where where, one of our finance users can, upload or integrate their contract life cycle management solution, upload a PDF of a signed order form, and Orb will use AI to automatically extract some of the key contract terms and build together, a a full schedule of invoices ready to go out for the life cycle of the contract. So here we're thinking about leveraging the same core billing engine at org, which we here think about as, you know, a Ferrari of a billing engine with so many advanced capabilities and knobs to help power our customers' powerful business models, but providing a very intuitive and native and, first class interface that makes it so much faster and so much easier to get to value. I love it. I love this kind of launch because it's you know, we see a lot of conversations out in the market about what finance is seeing, a lot of conversations about, you know, collections, reporting, all of which are really important, but I think I know you've continually challenged us to kind of ask that question of what is finance doing. And the answer is a lot of times, if you're a growth driven finance organization, it's getting really involved in contracting and setting profitable terms. Or even I know we were chatting the other day just getting ready for this webinar, and I asked you what your favorite small launch of the year was, and it was in UI changes for fine folks like finance teams to actually go in without an API, ditching the idea of just billing being an engineering first platform and, just allowing them to kind of get into the weeds, take the wheel, and do things themselves. I think this is such a good representation of that. Exactly. And this, you know, this sets up a a good springboard for us to, know, tease out or or preview some of the major themes that we're exploring in in 2026. And throughout this this conversation, we've been talking about the the idea of of revenue design. Right? But unfortunately, still with many of the folks that we come across, we see that there's some real blockers, for this pricing life cycle to really be cohesive and, a vector for for growth in their organizations. And the reality is that, you know, due to brittle infrastructure, billing becomes really slow and manual. The ability for for a team to become agile and experimental is really hampered and slowed down by the existing infrastructure that they have. And ultimately, maybe the decisions we end up making in pricing aren't on the critical path or lined up with where the growth strategy of the company is. So this is what we call the broken relay race of pricing. Orb exists to really solve this and bring together a cohesive experience that we call revenue design so that all these stakeholders can come together and really, turn pricing into a strategic advantage. It's the multifaceted nature of pricing. And I think we as a as a as a platform, we as a company are embracing this. And I think we're embracing the idea that we want revenue design to be collaborative, where everybody can pass the baton in the relay race at exactly the right moment to exactly the right stakeholder. And for this to be smooth and in sync, not, not really brittle and and and painful. Gosh. Like, all the kind of, you know, multi month, multi quarter, painful pricing projects I've I've I've experienced in my career before. Sounds traumatic. I love this articulation of the relay race. I know another rift that you and I have been having over the course of a couple months now, I guess, time flies, is this idea of what what does collaboration look like? You know, we keep hearing that point of feedback from our customers about wanting this to work, wanting to work better, recognizing that other people deserve to be in the room for some of these critical decisions, but not really sure how to kind of get out of that gridlock. And I think for a long time, we kind of thought you know, we we looked at other tools out there that claim to be collaborative. We looked at the Figma, the notions, and kind of tried tried to figure out what our collaboration identity was. And I think for a long time, we thought maybe this would be like a shared canvas kind of idea, like a Kumbaya moment. And I think, yeah, what you're articulating is great where I think the the core of it really is this idea of the perfect baton pass, right, where everyone gets to shine, everyone gets to kind of run their segment of the relay, but those handoffs and those critical moments and those overlaps are crisp, clear, and there's accountability. And there are no blockers to to a successful outcome with pricing. And I think we wanna empower every department that runs as part of this pricing relay raise to be successful and to ultimately help realize the the goals that they have of, which ultimately are finding ways to make their organizations brilliantly profitable. I love that phrasing. It's a really good dream. Tell me how it comes to life. Yeah. I mean Let's talk product. So let's let's continue to highlight several of the themes that you all our customers can expect to see from Warren in in 2026. I think we really are continuing to organize our product road map and our investment pillars into these three key areas. We wanna make sure that we are fully automating the manual out of billing. Teams today need to be operating in a much more strategic level and just frankly do not wanna get bogged down by the nuances and intricacies of a very painful manual billing process. So we're going to continue to invest in driving end to end automation through that workflow. We believe that modern organizations need to be able to execute their pricing strategy in a living, breathing, continual experimentation fashion. So again, we continue to think that pricing is not a set it and forget it exercise. So how can Orb as a product help you execute on your pricing strategy? That's that's the question that we have several of our teams at the company really think through. And then finally, the the reason why we're all here is how can we turn pricing into a strategic vector for revenue? So how can we help our customers actually grow their revenue and, drive insights and and identify opportunities through several of their their pillars. So you're gonna see a lot of these themes in some of the preview things that we're gonna be talking about for twenty twenty six as well as beyond. I'm excited. Let's take you through maybe I'm gonna pick three key three key areas I'm I'm particularly excited about. So the first, this is, an initiative we've heard from several of you. One of the unique things about Orb is that unlike other solutions in the market, we end up being a really good house for your entire business model. So everything from your self serve PLG customers as well as your enterprise sales like growth customers. And as part of doing this, it's really important that our customers have the ability to architect and curate a cohesive price book. Their entire pricing strategy defined in one place in one canvas. So that's the capability that we're building. We're we're launching, in partnership with several of our customers, a whole catalog of of of pricing and rates and things that you have in your in your platform to be able to manage them and evolve them all in one central place. And this ends up being important when you think about the kind of iterations and evolutions that are, necessary in your course of business, and we wanna really create a home where, this definition and this experimentation becomes very native. Mhmm. I love it. Yeah. Because we're we're having this conversation, right, about different folks wanting to step up and become pricing strategy leaders. You know, like, finance team is wanting to kind of rebrand as growth teams, product teams getting more involved in growth functions and pricing, even like the whole prom owners that we spoke about wanting to really PM pricing. And I think it's really I mean, it's amazing that we have simulations now where we can go about things in a data driven way. It's important to have price migrations to actually move and execute with agility, but, yeah, there's I think there's still this gap for that definition layer of really like, we're letting all these folks into the platform kind of, like, making or this central hub for all of these decisions, and I think it's it's really exciting to have a place where anyone, regardless of their level of technical ability, can come in and kind of set that strategy, define what pricing looks like at the company, and use that as a springboard for contracting, for billing, for all of these downstream strategy functions. Exactly. And if you can, you know, define everything in one central place, orchestrate changes through it, and simulate alternate strategies, you end up, again, really realizing that cohesive pricing life cycle. I think we are also gonna continue to deepen our capabilities when it comes to our finance workflows, and we're very excited that coming soon, actually coming very soon, we are releasing our AR aging report, which will be, I believe one of the the the most powerful and popular surfaces in our product that actually enable, a finance organization to drive their collections workflow. I know exactly, what's outstanding, what they should prioritize to go chase and and follow-up on, and ultimately, again, make, or the place where, you get to run the workflow, not just represent some of the data. And ultimately, this workflow is is also very cohesive. So making some investments, making, adding some additional capabilities around advanced dunning and intelligent reminders for when to collect payments. You're going to see Orb continue to lead the market and invest deeply within our finance capabilities so that not only will we be the place where teams can manifest and represent their, their very cohesive pricing strategies, but also where day to day finance organizations can help accelerate cash for their business. You can build your naughty list and set rules for what to do about it? Exactly. So maybe I'll I'll I'll kind of take a pause there thinking about, some of the the themes that we've been thinking about and connecting back to some of the the the new releases you all can expect from our platform, but, also much more to come in in 2026 as Orb continues down this path of of building revenue design for every company. Well, I'm very excited. I know we, we promised to leave a bit of time for for questions, so we'll take a moment to answer those. But, yeah, before we get into that, I just wanna thank everyone for coming today and for engaging with us in general. You know, everything that we learned, the most important things that we learned, we learned from all of you. So thank you for joining. Thank you for chatting with us, and please, do continue sharing your feedback, your thoughts, your wish list. Our chat is open for questions. Our DMs are open if you wanna have a conversation, and, wishing everyone a happy, 2025. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for for spending your morning with us. And I'm I'm really grateful about the partnership with all of our customers, and you all are out there building the future. And we see it in every one of you every single day. And, honestly, it's a privilege and we're so lucky to be thought partners and technology partners with you all in this journey. And I think we believe that we're building an important movement here. And again, if there's any way that org can help accelerate some of your business goals or or or help, accelerate some of your workflows, we're we're all ears open and and excited to to engage with you on all that. So maybe with that, we'll wrap up. Sounds great. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everybody.