“if you're talking to a product team and they really want to advocate for one part of this should absolutely be free because we want the most people using it... I would love a show of hands of whose company's KPIs are completely aligned... it's zero”

Align KPIs across teams before running free-vs-paid experiments

The hardest part of optimizing a freemium paywall is not deciding what to gate but getting product, revenue, and marketing teams to agree on which metric to optimize. When product wants MAU and revenue wants conversions, every paywall test surfaces as a political conflict rather than a data question. Aligning the team on a single north-star KPI before launching experiments is the prerequisite most companies skip.