Successful Stakeholders Series: Partnerships with Wendy Kam
5 keys to partnering with Partnerships
Over my product career, I’ve been in both positions of being in the driver’s seat and riding shotgun with partnerships. While other product managers may have different opinions, my perspective is that having a partner in partnerships is a real treat!
To get the scoop from the partnerships perspective, I’m bringing in guest expert, Wendy Kam. Wendy heads up Social Commerce, Entertainment and Emerging product partnerships at Shopify. The partnerships that she led contributed to Shopify’s position as Forbes’ top 10 most innovative social media companies in 2022!
Prior to joining Shopify, Wendy spent seven years in Google’s Product Partnership team, after beginning her career in partnerships at Visa where she led strategic partnerships efforts within a business unit. She started her career in investment banking and consulting in Hong Kong and New York. This is the third article in the Successful Stakeholders Series that helps product managers do their best work with cross-functional partners.
There are many flavors of partnerships
Product managers should understand that partnerships is a very broad term and, depending on company size, stage of company growth, and business needs, the role of partnerships can vary. That means that the way that you will work with them will vary too.
A classic division of partnership is business development and partner management. You can think of Business Development team members as hunters focused on signing new deals, while Partner Management team members are more akin to farmers - working on deal renewals, managing day-to-day partnerships, growing the business opportunity, and even sunsetting a partnership when needed.
A different type of partnership division is Product vs Revenue Partnerships. Product Partnerships team members work with product managers to launch a new product, or improve an existing product or platform. Their work could include distributing products on a partner's platform (or vice versa), signing technology licenses to improve your product offering, or creating whitelabeled solutions. On the other hand, Revenue Partnerships team members help drive revenue growth by identifying partners to accelerate sales targets. This team focuses on commercial levers like best-practice implementations, incentives, and co-marketing to help sign new revenue deals, cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.
As a PM, you may strategize with Partnerships on how to distribute your product on a partner’s platform and then dig in with your PM counterpart on how your ideas can be implemented. You may be asked to present your product roadmap with a prospective or existing partner. Partnership team members would build a business case or develop rationale to add features to your product roadmap that could be critical to improving the product/platform that would allow the teams to secure new deals or forge deeper partnerships to meet company goals. Partnership teams help PMs by providing feedback from partners and clients in the market to help evolve the product roadmap.
My T overlaps with your T
PMs need to provide visibility on the roadmap and product vision early on with partners. They need to communicate how they are prioritizing resources and ensure the partnership team gets the right feedback from partners to ensure buy-in from partners.
Conversely, Partnerships is responsible for understanding the user experience and the integration (e.g. APIs) that is used to enable that user experience and how data flows between two organizations. By having a deeper understanding of product integrations both sides are envisioning, Partnerships can help PMs anticipate questions that partners ask and influence the product team in defining a product roadmap that brings the partner to the same side of the table.
PMs and Partnerships are both T-shaped professions. Those that specialize in Product Partnerships are especially similar! You can think of a PM as having a major in loving products and a minor in being technical, whereas Partnerships as having a major in contract negotiation and partnership management and a minor in loving products. At the end of the day, you both love products.
Don’t be afraid to leverage Partnerships
PMs are constantly juggling different priorities, workstreams, and cross functional partners. The great thing about having a partner in Partnerships is that they can take things off of your plate. For example, Partnerships can add value by translating the discussions about product alignment into contractual agreements. They will make sure that what you understood is the same thing that the partner’s team understood, and that it is captured in writing. Partnerships will also ensure legal compliance and considerations to protect end users and data rights on both sides. And finally, after the deal is done, Partnerships can help track progress against the agreed upon goals. In other words, Partnerships will work together with you to help hit your goals and deliver a good user experience. That’s what we call a win-win!
Product partnerships = more complexity
If you’re exploring building a product that has a product partnership, be aware that the execution becomes infinitely more complex. Not only are you building a product for your own customer base, but you have to account for what the product experience is like for the partner and their customer base. This complexity requires more in-depth planning and execution, both internally and externally. In fact, you will find the stakeholder group double in size to ship a product! But don’t let the complexity of execution deter you, let your Partnerships team help you navigate it.
Err on overcommunication
When things go wrong with partnerships, it typically falls into one of three common problem types.
Partnerships comes up with an idea and does not bring Product Management into it before sharing it with the partner. The partner becomes enamored with the idea and convinced that it’s happening, but gets disappointed when it is not added to the roadmap.
Product Management comes up with ideas and does not let Partnerships know. Or the PMs at each company interface with each other but don’t include their Partnerships teams. Partnerships gets brought in late, discovers that what’s been discussed is missing some fundamentals, and needs to be reworked. It also leaves Partnerships less time to align to safeguard the interests of their respective company and joint customers.
The partner works on features without letting Partnerships or Product Management know. By the time the company learns about the partner changes, it will affect the product and degrade the user experience.
The root cause behind all three of these problem types is lack of communication and alignment. The amount of communication depends on the lifecycle of the product. If the product experience and use case is new, then you should expect much more collaboration between PM, Partnerships, and the partner teams.
Wrap Up
By now, you should understand different types of partnerships, how the role of PM and Partnerships overlap but add value, and how to avoid common pitfalls.
Wendy shares a final best practice to ensure organizational alignment. First, identify dedicated PM and Partnerships team members for a product. From there, you should establish a regular cadence of roadmap sharing internally and with the partner, ideally every six weeks and at minimum two times a quarter. Finally, you should brainstorm and incorporate partnership strategies into your company’s annual planning process. Implementing these moves will take your partnering with Partnerships game to the pros!
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