Product, Partners, and Communities
Five key lessons to win with partners, create great products, and build communities
1. Customer Obsession
2. Develop Intuition
3. Create Clarity
4. Relentless Execution
5. Have Fun
For most of my career, I’ve been responsible for partner strategy and implementation. I began my Microsoft career as an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) evangelist, supporting ISVs and Startups with ideation, design, development, and Go-To-Market strategies. Later in my career, I was responsible for Microsoft’s strategy for building a partner ecosystem to support strategic initiatives, aiding partners in developing cloud-based services and solutions, and aligning them with Microsoft’s sales and marketing growth channels.
I am now Director of Product at Bing Multimedia, where we are building unique multimedia experiences for users and, more importantly, developing a creator and influencer ecosystem that capitalizes on the network effect content marketplace and passion economy to drive growth.
I’ve gained valuable knowledge about building partner ecosystems, recognizing, and acting on motivations, collaborating, winning, and growing businesses, and establishing ecosystems.
As a product manager, evangelist, and trusted advisor, I found five key lessons to win with partners, create great products, and build communities.
Customer / Partner Obsession
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, empathize with them, understand their challenges, and find joint solutions. Your role is because of the customers; in my case, my customers are ISVs, Channel Partners, creators, and influencers. Practice servant leadership principles. Listen with Empathy. Develop an appreciation for their business models, unique challenges, competition product gaps, key strategy, and execution. Then, collaborate effectively to find opportunities and enable execution.
Your goal is to be their trusted advisor; work super hard to gain their trust.
Always be transparent about your ability, competency, technology, and platform. Your goal is to make them successful, be it your platform or someone else. Bring those learning back to your products and develop or integrate your products to serve your partner better. As a key partner, it is your primary role to bring relevant solutions to make them successful. If you cannot fulfill their key gaps, advise them to find an alternative. In the long run, the trust will help you and your products to be successful in the industry and with the partner ecosystem.
Develop Intuition
Read widely. Experiment with products frequently, sign up for industry and product newsletters, get free trials of products and services — competitors, friends, or aspirational products, and test extensively. Determine which functions the product performs best for you as a consumer and which functions could be enhanced. Take notes and share them back with the product teams. Provide critical feedback in private forums and amplify good features and innovation publicly. You want the product to succeed, gain traction, and entice others to test, not punish them for “unfinished” features and capabilities. Establish and be part of a positive industry collaborative environment.
Develop a broader perspective, not limited to your domain or technology. Innovation and learning are not limited to one aspect. You can find product inspiration in all walks of life or professions. Remember, political operatives, policymakers, and technology companies all use A/B testing at speed and scale to win. Dedicate time to read and learn from adjacent and non-adjacent realms.
Reading, sharing, and learning will help develop your product sense and enhance your intuition to improve your products and services.
Create Clarity
Businesses, people, products, and strategies can be ambiguous due to competing priorities, motivations, internal and external variables, and politics and aspirations. Lack of clarity breeds confusion, dissatisfaction and impedes team performance. Your job is to separate the noise from the signal. It isn’t easy, but experience begets intuition. Clarity regarding why, what, how, and who aids each in executing the mission fosters alignment and shared success.
The goal must be to communicate effectively for clarity — the clarity for vision, strategy, and execution.
The best way to achieve and communicate clarity is to write. Aspire for clarity: Write — Edit — Publish — Repeat.
Always, with rigor and discipline, write a 2–3 pager memo to gain clarity and tell the story. Optionally rely on PowerPoint to tell a visual story but have the memo sent to the audience as a pre-read. Writing is hard, and it is even harder to succinctly write your ideas in a short form of a one-pager. Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Writing a short memo takes a lot of effort, time, edits, and clarity of thought, and it is always worth the extra time. It helps you gain the clarity of your thinking, challenge your ideas and assumptions, and give your audience to grasp it quickly by reading it and then asking questions.
Relentless Execution
Focus on Execution. Execution is all about getting stuff done that aligns with strategy and plans. Execution gets the win. But conversely, any strategy or plan is worthless without a relentless and tenacious fixation on execution. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Perspiration is focused execution.
Execution is about people, resources, time, and getting things done on a daily basis to achieve goals. Execution needs details, fine prints, implementation, doing things that matter, and throwing away work that doesn’t align. Execution is about divisiveness, hard work, and perseverance. Execution is about touching base with your stakeholders, continuously listening, and learning with a very clear-eyed focus on the prize. You need to have a system, a process that helps you to drive towards that goal. Execution is a system made up of small and consistent activities that you perform progressively, continuously learning, pivoting as the situation changes to achieve your goal.
We need to make hard choices and fail fast, which also means experimenting a lot. Experience begets intuition. Knowing which battles to fight to win the war.
Execution is embracing a Honey Badger Mentality.
Be Bold, Build Support, and Have Fun
Be Bold in your thinking and setting goals. Yes, the plans have to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound), but always think of them as stretching you and your team to achieve more. I am a big fan of BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) as strategic goals and then chunking them as SMART ones for tactics and execution.
Build cross-functional support system within the team and organization. Everyone wants to help if you understand their motivations, help them learn and grow, and most importantly, ASK. Bring energy to all conversations. Exuberance and passion align motivation to deliver success. Help and support others to succeed.
Most importantly, have fun! Enjoy what you do, be a continuous learner.
If the job doesn’t’ provide fun and opportunity for learning — change!
