Integrations aren’t built by two companies. They’re built by two partner managers.
Executives, legal and product will rewrite your plan. How two partner managers keep a partnership alive anyway, by acting like one team.
On paper, a technology partnership is a deal between two companies. In practice, it lives or dies on whether two people, one partner manager on each side, can carry it through everyone else who has a say.
The plan meets reality
You can plan an integration for a week, a quarter or a year. Then reality shows up, usually from three directions:
- Executives, who give the green light for an integration, a joint launch or an event, and can just as easily pause it.
- Legal, who live in a different world. Partnerships want to move; legal does due diligence. A deal can look perfect until legal reads the fine print, and some deals end before they start.
- Product, where the team is busy with something else, the resources aren’t there, a bug appears, priorities shift, or a new launch takes over the roadmap.
None of this is anyone being difficult. It’s every team doing its job. But it means the plan you started with is rarely the plan you finish with.
Don’t give up. Plan around it.
When a door closes, the worst move is to drop the whole partnership. The better one is to find what’s still doable. Maybe the full integration has to wait, but a joint webinar, a co-marketing campaign or a smaller first version can happen now. One door closes, another opens. You just have to look for it.
Two partner managers, one team
The partnerships that work best are the ones where the two partner managers stop acting like two sides of a negotiation and start acting like one team. Yes, each works for their own company. But together they decide how to explain the partnership to their product managers, how to answer legal’s questions, and how to make the case to their executives. They relay messages, prepare each other for the hard conversations, and push in the same direction.
That only works if they actually get along. The best partner managers I’ve worked with became friends first.
Keep it fair, and keep it human
A partnership has to be good for both sides, in some way or another. If one company gets far more out of it than the other, it will fade the moment priorities change. Look for a deal where both sides get something comparable, even if it’s not the same thing.
And have fun with it. Partnerships are relationships between people. Be human, be honest about what your side can and can’t do, and the hard moments get a lot easier to get through together.