Adding a new SKU feels harmless. It's one more option for customers and one more way to customize the offering.

But here's what actually happens: your sales reps start hedging their quotes because they're not sure which SKU to use. 

Your finance team can't close the books because pricing logic is scattered. And nobody can figure out why deals are taking longer to close.

SKU sprawl is one of the most overlooked blockers to revenue growth.

Mat Rodriguez, VP of RevOps at Yugabyte, has seen this play out firsthand. His take? "If you have more than a handful of products, you're probably thinking way too hard about what you offer."

Mat, who builds pricing frameworks for technical platforms, has seen firsthand how fragmented product catalogs hurt every part of revenue, from sales confidence to quote-to-cash system execution.

The mission of RevOps is straightforward: help revenue teams move faster and work smarter. But deal complexity undermines that mission, and SKU sprawl is often the root cause.

Before Mat and his team standardized pricing at Yugabyte, the sales environment was chaotic. Similar use cases were priced differently depending on which rep you talked to. Some AEs would propose pricing that was, in Mat's words, "super wild and off the cuff."

When pricing depends on manual adjustments and obscure SKU logic, sales reps lose confidence. When reps lose confidence, deals stall. Mat's insight is simple but powerful: "The more precise the pricing, the more likely a deal will close."

Reps thrive when they have codified pricing, clear discount thresholds, and standardized rules they can trust. Instead of hedging with "It might be 400, maybe 500, could be 600K," they can say with conviction, "This quote is $500,000." That clarity matters for closing deals, but it also matters for forecast accuracy and pipeline integrity.

For technical platforms like Yugabyte, an enterprise-grade distributed SQL database, product fragmentation is a common trap.

Mat says maintaining 30 or 50 distinct SKUs for a "pretty straightforward product offering" is unnecessary and costly. Many of these SKUs were slight variations on the same offering that didn't warrant a unique identifier.

Mat and his team are actively working to bring their SKU count down from 10 to 15 to four or five because, as he put it, "it's fundamentally the same stuff, just different slices of it."

This kind of simplification matters. Excessive complexity creates friction for sales and downstream teams in finance and billing, who often function as the internal Deal Desk.

Mat uses a clear analogy to explain effective pricing architecture. He compares the core product to a “Big Mac,” a flagship offering that stays consistent, scalable, and easy to price. This core must have predictable pricing that lets sales reps quote with certainty, without hesitation or one-off customization on every deal.

Flexibility, he says, should exist at the edges. That is where add-ons, premium tiers, and tailored options belong, allowing teams to expand value without introducing complexity or weakening the integrity of the core product.

His measure of success? "The literal hours that we're saving."

When reps provide inconsistent pricing inputs, it makes standardizing order management and billing almost impossible. But when the core architecture is locked in, the entire revenue operation runs more smoothly.

SKU simplification is a strategic move that strengthens your revenue architecture. Mat's experience shows that fewer SKUs and better guardrails unlock sales rather than limiting them

If you're sitting on a bloated product catalog, ask yourself one question: How many of these SKUs are differentiated, and how many are just creating noise that slows everything down?

Watch the full conversation with Mat Rodriguez on latest episode of The Lift.