DeveloperWeek 2023

Swapna Malekar, Principal Product Lead, Microsoft

Partnerships in a product organization might mean you want to bring in skills & product differentiation that are outside your product purview, or you want to scale your product quickly without training resources yourself, or you want to capture a new market segment and bring synergies amongst new lines of businesses.

Whatever your product goals might be, partnerships come in a variety of different formats - getting things done with external vendors, negotiating your requests on internal product team's roadmaps or partnering with external product companies to benefit from each other's industry monopolies.

How do then product managers make these partnerships a success?
- What’s the process of goal setting with your partners?
- How do you reconcile communication styles whilst working with your internal or external stakeholders?
- What happens when partnerships don’t go according to plan?

I’ll recount real-world examples from my previous work experiences – partnering with a tech company as a large banking behemoth, partnering with the world’s largest Mobile OEM as a cloud storage provider at Microsoft, and then partnering with internal product teams as the productivity organization at Microsoft (that I’m a part of today).

Learning objectives would be :
1. Understanding different flavors of partnerships across startups & corporates
2. Learning how to set goals, objectives and success metrics for different types of partnership scenarios
3. Identifying strategies to work the partnership in your favor – creating a win-win scenario.
4. Determining ways to add value to your partners in challenging situations