The Power of Partnering Right

The world is competitive, and moving faster than it ever has before. In this type of environment it’s very difficult to compete on your own. In the technology space, it’s impossible.

Image of a person holding home made software as if it is a fresh baked pie

Organizations that suffer from slow speed-to-market are often those that feel that they need to satisfy every customer need in-house. Once this assumption is shed, it’s much faster and more efficient to find a strategic partner to synergize on capabilities, than it is to build it yourself.

While they can be the fastest route to new competencies, partnerships are not easy.

Building a true partnerships is not a side-of-desk activity. It’s a distinct discipline and competency that an organization must create and foster to ultimately enable the capabilities jointly to market.

Image of someone offering a partner to literally sit on the corner of their desk

To be successful, organizations must intentionally design and invest the resources, and commit towards building high-performing partnership capabilities. They don’t happen by accident.

I’ve seen various models over the years, and in my experience there are 3 success factors to make this work:

1) Bring in the Right Talent

Building and maintaining partnerships is a discipline, and one you can’t assume is already within the wheelhouse of your product or technology teams. Organizations that are truly committed to making partnerships a meaningful part of their strategy, have purpose-built teams that specialize in this capability.

Image of someone asking a developer to negotiate a new contract which they aren't happy to do

2) Create Joint Roadmaps

Start with the client strategic roadmap and align your go-to-market roadmaps to ensure both organizations are working collaboratively toward the same objectives. If there isn’t a clear and committed go-to-market roadmap, that aligns on the value being delivered to market, you’re setting yourself to be disappointed.

Working on a joint roadmap as if it's two people doing a puzzle based off of their shared client's roadmap

3) Commit to Execution

Formalizing partnerships with appropriate due diligence and contracts is critical; however it is equally important to be clear on the value and commitment of the individual capabilities each is accountable for. Partnerships are a very easy thing to talk about, a very difficult thing to execute. Adding some rigour to the commitment by putting in the right checks and balances is critical.

One person asks another to sign formal contract, the other says we normally do pinky swears

In today’s fast pace of change and transformation, many of us are heavily investing, continuing operations and re-imaging our entire business models all at the same time!

The future will be require us to become fully interconnected with the ecosystem around us. The only way to do this fast enough will be to build strong partnerships. However, building partnerships may be the easy part; delivering the aggregated value to market consistently is not.

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