Partnerships for Product Managers

How to drive a win-win partnership for your product

Recently Microsoft and ServiceNow announced a strategic alliance to modernize business processes with Copilot and agents. At AWS re:Invent, AWS and others announced new cloud partnerships.

These are just a few of the many partnership announcements in the past months. Each announcement is a celebration and mutual happiness between the partners. Joint customers are excited about the collaboration between the partners, too.

Why Are Partnerships on the Rise?

Several trends are pushing more product integrations:

• Customers are demanding end-to-end solutions across their vendors

• Competitive pressure for innovative features through collaboration with partners

• The rise of modular products that make integration easier through APIs

• AI integration through AI specialist partners

• Strategic advantage gained from partners in new markets or customer segments

Likewise, the role of product managers is shifting to driving business outcomes. Partnerships can enhance the value of your product. To manage successful partnerships, product managers can balance technical, customer, and business perspectives.

Many of the partnerships seem straightforward. However, product managers can miss hidden risks in the partnership.

The Hidden Risks in Partnerships

Behind the excitement of a partnership announcement, there can be signals that a partnership needs product management attention. Here are some of the signs of partnership trouble:

• Unclear roles: open discussion about how the partnership works both technically and commercially

• Dependencies overlooked: timing of investment and coordinated engineering efforts

• Goals not aligned: business objectives aren't a fit

Do these signs of trouble sound familiar? Yes! These are cross-functional issues that product managers overcome while supporting their products.

Treating a partnership like another cross-functional relationship is key to success. Product managers are tuned in to trouble signals and actively resolve them.

Partnership Complications

There are a few complications when dealing with an external relationship you don’t see on an internal cross-functional team. The differences in a partnership are:

• Minimal insight into the partner's financials: on product integration, the specific product financials won't be known

• Operational disconnects: tooling, development processes, and operational status reporting vary from organization to organization

• Limited track record: with minimal contact at different levels of the organization, there is no relationship history for issue resolution

With these differences how can product managers lead the way to partnership success?

Partnership Success After the Announcement

Despite the complicating factors of dealing with external partnerships, product managers have the best perspective to catch the trouble signs and lead the way to a successful partnership.

Some of the practices that lead to a successful partnership are:

1. Get the value of the cross-functional team: your legal team, procurement, engineering, and stakeholders have insights and relationships that can head off partnership trouble

2. A playbook: document goals, decisions, roles, and risk management plans for the whole team to use

While it is easy to see the benefits of a partnership, how do overloaded teams take steps to make partnerships successful?

Set Timeline Expectations

With forethought, you can take steps to partnership success a bit at a time. By incorporating partnerships into your regular product initiatives, you can get cross-functional support. Setting proper expectations is key to getting space for thinking and incremental progress.

Considering that central functions like Legal and Procurement are handling multiple partnerships will pace your integration efforts. Likewise, the partner will be dealing with similar limitations on people to assist.

Set expectations that a partnership will take several months to complete. If you are met with disbelief, then consult with your legal team about the time it took on the last external contract.

Partnerships are long-term relationships. Taking your time to enter the relationship by establishing shared goals pays off with a solid relationship of trust.

Frequently the partnership timeline is urgent - below are some tips to accelerate your partnership onboarding.

The Partnership Team

Before getting too deep with the external partner, it is key to get a small internal team together to understand the reason for the partnership and the priority of the partnership.

Here are the key people and why:

• Legal: to protect your organization from compliance issues and risk issues

• Procurement: financial and contractual expertise and negotiation of terms

• Financial: evaluate the financial impact of the partnership

• Engineering / Development: assess the technical feasibility of contract teams

Prepare a point-of-view document for these key teams. The point-of-view document covers:

• The use case for the partnership

• The possible opportunity coming from the partnership

• Assess the possibility of additional partners in the ecosystem

• New capabilities and dependencies needed to support the partnership

• The priority of this partnership and the reason for the priority

The point-of-view document helps these teams allocate time to work with you.

If your organization is too small for separate functions, then ask related roles in your organization to assist part-time with their expertise. Don't try to do the partnership agreement alone! These agreements can be dramatic and complex. You will need 1 or 2 knowledgeable people in your organization to discuss trade-offs.

Also, you need to keep your product team and program management team involved in the partnership developments.

Partnership Playbook

As you work with partners, you will find your way to best practices. For example, how much risk does your organization want to take based on the size of the opportunity? Are there brand or reputational objectives that must be met?

As you take on more partners, the playbook will help you scale with standard contracts and with additional team members developing partners.

The contents of a typical partnership playbook go through these partnership phases:

1. Partner strategy: goals of the partnership area and alignment with business goals

2. Partner selection: criteria for a successful partner in terms of financial health and risk assessment

3. Partner contract: contract terms, decision-makers, and operational requirements

4. Partner management: staying in compliance with the contract

The summary of the playbook is below:

A partner playbook is a proactive way for product managers to document partnership best practices while working with partners.

Avoiding Common Partnership Pitfalls

Product managers can't control the timing of these types of agreements. Often there are events and unrelated communication opportunities that necessitate announcements externally.

The timing of the partnership announcement is disconnected from the playbook steps. A successful partnership still needs your product management attention on the playbook steps.

When there is urgency in the partnership playbook, then product managers focus on these items:

• Roles and responsibilities between your team, the partner, and the customer: a quick and dirty RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart gets the teams aligned

• Shared goals: write the major outcomes expected from the partnership

• Risk management: new risks coming from the partnership and how to manage them

• Escalation paths: who do you call when the unexpected happens?

Your initial playbook focuses on these 4 items. You can add what you learn as you work through the partnership phases.

Partner Playbook Template

Here is an example template of a partnership playbook:

A free download of this template is here.

Conclusion - Drive a Win-Win Partnership

Product managers play a key role in moving partnerships from announcements to operational success stories. Navigating cross-functional relationships ensures that partnerships deliver value, not just promises.

Developing a playbook is a proactive way to manage the risk of partnerships and lay the groundwork for the next partnership. The partnership playbook keeps your product competitive and innovative.

Behind every partnership is a team that collaborates to drive operational success. Product managers can lead partnerships that exceed expectations—creating true win-win outcomes.

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A related 3-part article on partnerships: External Vendor Handling for Product Managers

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TLDR Product listed Product Management IRL articles recently! This biweekly email provides a consolidated email of recent product management articles.

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Last week’s backstory for paid subscribers was what happened when I followed my advice on creating a point-of-view document. Taking a Stand with a POV

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