Growth Engine for IBM and Startups
I work for IBM and have managed relationships for over 20 vendors, including Segment and Optimizely. I’m part of a 5-person product management team who works on the growth stack at IBM with best in class tools and solutions, which power the Growth Engine (our team’s namesake and mission).
What you’ll learn from this blog post: How do you sell to an IBM? And how do you successfully manage a relationship with an IBM-like enterprise as a startup?
Our team’s rules of engagement:
- Give us (IBM) the tools to succeed, and we’ll build the customizations for ourselves
- Share your ideas early with humility, and we’ll provide use cases and pain points where there’s opportunity to deliver value
- Be open and honest about what you can deliver. These days, the well-known mantra, “under promise, over deliver” doesn’t work if you’re in a competitive market and cannot make any promises.
(1) Give us the tools to succeed, and we’ll build the customizations for ourselves
Our IBM team wants to use what’s valuable and amazing about our startup vendors and friends! As much as possible, we’d like to take advantage of what’s already there out-of-the-box.
Everything else, we want to be able to take advantage of vendor APIs, webhooks, extensions, SDKs, and partner apps that allow us to build the customizations for our IBM-specific needs.
As long as we still find enough value in the out-of-the-box to justify the investment in workarounds and extensions, we don’t mind continuing to use what’s amazing about the vendor’s product.
In other words, don’t fall for Trello’s trap #3 as described by Product Habits.
(2) Share your ideas early with humility, and we’ll provide use cases and pain points where there’s opportunity to deliver value
Relating to the previous point, IBM knows how to satisfy large customers without breaking bank. We use our experience with our IBM customers to help our vendors navigate and prioritize use cases that represent large companies (>1,000 employees) in general versus IBM-specific.
We help provide and prioritize use cases that help our startup vendor/partners get to scale. We’ll help you break down how to get there. All you (startup) have to do is let us know what you do NOT want to do or are NOT willing to do. We’ll figure out how to fill in the gaps together, once we know what they are.
(3) Be open and honest about what you can deliver.
These days, the well-known mantra, “underpromise, overdeliver” doesn’t work if you’re in a competitive market and cannot make any promises.
On the other hand, if you overpromise and underdeliver, you’ll lose trust. If you repeat this habit, you’ll find it harder and harder to win back any credibility.
Let us know what you can deliver in general. No ETAs, no dates (DD-MM-YYYY), no months, no quarter… Unless you KNOW for a fact you’re going to deliver a feature a month or two in advance, and, even then, over estimate. The best thing you can do is let us know 2 things:
- Where is the thing we want in this progression: idea 💭→ in the backlog 🤔→ design 🖌 → dev 💻 → beta 🙂 → GA 🌟
- If it’s in design or later, how can we help you deliver it to a higher, better quality?
Best of luck!
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