The Minimum Viable Partnership
Leading with the Alignment Document
Growing access to open APIs within tech companies and readily made available SDKs for developers are increasing the partnership opportunities out there; but how do you, as the Partner Manager, prioritize which ones are worthwhile? How do you get buy-in? How do you measure potential ROI in a poker game where everyone holds their cards close to their chest?
If your goal is to create great partnerships between your product and complementary services, these may be all questions and challenges that you struggle with everyday.
The purpose of this piece is to help guide you through this journey by creating a collaborative document that can be shared to all internal and external stakeholders.
Before we look at the document structure, we need to briefly explore why this has become a challenge and where we, as the Partner Managers, fit in. A great article on the challenges was written by Brandon Chu (GM of Shopify, previous Product Head) on the concept of “Ruthless Prioritization”.
In the tech world — integration partnerships require resources from your Product team and they are constantly pulled from many different departments, stakeholders, and customers for their time.
This requires the Partner Manager to be able to understand and speak the same language of the departments the best they can. You do this by providing a compelling case study that tested a hypothesis on a potentially successful partnership and showing the results from that test.
The Alignment Document
Early on the mission is to get things off the ground.
This document will serve many purposes over its life from garnering interest from unaware stakeholders to capturing your back-of-the-napkin lunch conversations with the other partner manager into a tangible action plan.
A. Overview
What is this partnership?
This section is your elevator pitch. Either it came from you or was approached to you by the other company’s Partner Manager. Ideally for a MVP, you want to be able to explain what this partnership is within a paragraph.
You want to be able to explain what you’re potentially selling so either side can understand the opportunity. The objective should be clear and it should speak to everyone from an executive to the front-line workers.
Who are we targeting?
You want to be able to explain what you’re potentially selling and who you are targeting. Which user base will be targeted first?
In the MVP phase it’s best to keep this into a smaller and more targeted base. The old spray-and-pray model (gather as many partnerships as possible and pray something hits) is becoming more and more obsolete as teams become hyper-focused and accountable for ROI. Work with your Partner Manager in identifying the ideal customer profile that uses both products and work on delivering an exceptional buyer journey.
With a more controlled user base you’ll be able to predict success if this was scaled up to everyone. You’ll also be able to document challenges and try again with improved strategy if the first test was a failure.
How will we reach our target market?
The action in which you will be reaching out to the target market for the potential partnership. This section gets into the first deliverable action that you will be measuring. Some examples for this would be:
- a webinar to gauge interest amongst 200 existing users with a follow up with attendees
- mass email to a user base announcing a partnership with a discounted landing page
- survey to a user base to gauge interest on a potential integration
When will we be launching Phase 1?
Straight forward — gives both teams a definitive go launch date. Be realistic and hold each other accountable for this date. A ton of partnerships go sideways because the commitment for a launch date is not upheld. Especially for smaller companies trying to work with bigger ones.
The more you drag on a potential partnership the more likely the larger company will think you’re wasting their time.
B. Goals and KPIs
This section is helpful to determine each company’s values within this partnership and to align on objectives. A good alignment would be both companies seeing a partnership
Example of misalignment is if a smaller partner may consider 20 trials a success meanwhile the larger partner is measuring on converted upgrades and needs north of 100.
This section can help you prioritize partnerships. If predicted conversion is too small in scope then your supporting departments will not consider this a successful test. It will help you understand where to divvy up your busy day and how much resources you should be spending between projects.
Goals
What are some hard and soft goals for this partnership? Some examples to help you get started:
Hard Goals:
These are quantifiable.
- Understand the conversion rate of the targeted user base
- Measure number of net new trials
- Increase MRR of average upgrade
- Sell x amount of new packages
Soft Goals:
These are objective because they are harder to measure but help you gain an understanding of the buyer and their journey.
- Learn about the challenges and successes in selling into this base
- Positive feedback from customers regarding partnership
Key Results
What are the KPIs that would consider a “Phase 1” a success? These tie with the goals but document the “bar of success”. Examples would be:
- Increase of $xxxxx MRR
- % of quota obtained by Sales team
- xx number of attendees to a webinar with x% interested in product
C. Milestones
What are actionable items along the way with the appropriate checkpoints?
This part of the document tends to be the longest. This gets into the Go-To-Market for your partnership and varies greatly depending upon what the two of you are doing. Suggested template for that would be the following:
[To Be Action]— Date to Action: Month Day, Year
Status: Not Started / In Progress / Started / Completed
1. [Company A] To Do This
2. [Company B] To Do That
Results:[To Be Created] — Date to Action: Month Day, Year
Status: Not Started / In Progress / Started / Completed
1. [Company A] To Do This
2. [Company B] To Do That
Results:[To Be Measured] — Date to Action: Month Day, Year
Status: Not Started / In Progress / Started / Completed
1. [Company A] To Do This
2. [Company B] To Do That
Results:
Another suggestion would be to have all shared and supported files included within the milestones for documentation. A simple Google Sheets link shared within each milestone will help each partner collaborate a lot easier.
Try to not overcomplicate this part. Remember it’s only the first step — it’s meant to be a quick action plan for an exciting opportunity.
Reporting and Building Upon Success / Failure
Success!…or failure. You’ve laid everything out and have completed the document. You’ve also over the days/weeks/months carefully executed upon all milestones. You’ve now got a great working document that you can present to your internal teams.
If all went well and you’ve hit your bars of success you’ll have a clear business case for company resources to invest in the next multi-million dollar project. They’ll need to go deeper into the weeds but you’ve done what you could in generating interest in the most minimal way possible (because remember, there’s only so many hours in a day).
If you haven’t, it’s back to the drawing board. Either you’ve decided to test again with a different user group or can decide to go your separate ways.
Most projects fail before they even get started, using this document will hopefully get those projects off the ground.
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