How To Co-Build Products with Partners
Most platforms already have strong foundations to co-build with partners.
Most partner-first companies initially prioritize revenue-generating partnerships, like channel partners, affiliates, and system integrators. This makes strategic sense - revenue will always be the fundamental driver of business growth and sustainability.
But there’s another, complementary, partner opportunity hiding in plain sight, often underutilized by startups, scale-ups, and platforms alike. In addition to co-marketing and co-selling products with partners, what if you co-build new products together?
Bundling innovation and distribution
Wiz is the perfect example of a platform company that figured out the “co-build” opportunity early. Founded in January 2020, Wiz scaled from a $0 to $32 billion market cap within five years, before Google’s acquisition announcement in 2025.
Co-building was a big reason Wiz scaled as quickly as they did.
Wiz started with revenue-focused partnerships - channel and affiliate - oriented around scaling adoption of existing products through partners. But Wiz also created a product partnerships team, reporting to their CPO, focused on co-building products with partners, including AWS (Amazon), GCP (Google), and Azure (Microsoft).
In concert with those partners, Wiz’s product partnerships team set about understanding customer problems, building solutions, measuring engagement - and building products that created new distribution and revenue opportunities for them.
This bi-modal approach, complementing revenue-focused channel partnerships with innovation-focused product partnerships compounded into a reported $500 million ARR business by 2024. And, of course, that $32 billion - all cash - exit.
Co-build
But Wiz weren’t the first - and won’t be the last - to take this bi-modal partnerships approach en-route to a phenomenal market cap. Co-building with partners spins up a variety of innovation, distribution, and revenue flywheels that quickly compound to make customers, partners, and companies more successful.
I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to “co-build” products with partners in a variety of roles over the years. Here’s three co-build approaches I’ve seen work well.
Product partner management
The first approach is simple: create well-defined product partnerships roles and teams focused on co-building with partners. These are slightly different from other partnerships roles in that there often aren’t well defined revenue goals or targets.
My first role at Facebook in 2012 was my first experience of working in this “product partnerships” capacity. I was very much focused on “co-build” opportunities with partners, acting as an external-influencing product manager.
It was a hands-on role, and I would often embed with partner product and engineering teams to co-build with them for days or weeks at a time - whether it was in London with Salesforce and Experian, or with Wix in Tel Aviv.
It was my responsibility to guide and influence their product roadmap as best I could.
And how did we mutually measure success? We focused on the creation of utility value - tracking near term engagement and long term, product-led, revenue growth.
For example, when co-building Facebook Ad buying capabilities with Wix’s ShoutOut product, we didn’t focus on a revenue target. Instead, our goal was to increase the ad create flow completion rate which was - in our standard ad buying tools - around 1%.
Ultimately, through co-building a deeply integrated Facebook Ad buying solution that leveraged assets and targeting data within Wix’s existing platform, we increased that completion rate to around 3% within a matter of months. Revenue quickly followed.
Product accelerators
Accelerators are another, semi-scaled way to “co-build” products together with partners. Often the best candidates are existing service-focused channel partners - agencies with lots of talent but no sources of recurring product revenue.
“Facebook Accelerate” solved a well-defined problem. Facebook’s advertising revenue was growing quickly in markets like Central and Eastern Europe, but there were no localised AdTech products to help clients scale their advertising spend efficiently.
Our big global partners weren’t building for these markets - the needs were too niche.
The application process was pretty simple. Partners would pitch us solutions to customer challenges we’d shared with them. Those that put in real effort - thought through potential solutions, committed time to co-build with us - were accepted.
It was a multi-month commitment for everyone involved, including Facebook’s fantastic solutions engineers who allocated time and code to partners.
But it paid off handsomely. Products “co-built” through these accelerators contributed billions in advertising revenue to Facebook in the intervening years. One company “born” out of the accelerator, ROIHunter, now employs over 85 people.
Based on lessons learned at Facebook, we spun up a product accelerator at HubSpot, to solve similar problems. We had a fast-growing customer base, in a fast growing number of markets. But our own products didn’t serve those unique market needs well.
Meanwhile, one of our largest competitors, Salesforce, offered thousands of niche, partner-built, solutions through AppExchange. Our ecosystem of “market maker” integrations was tiny in comparison. The HubSpot App Accelerator would fill that gap.
We brought cohorts of HubSpot Solutions Partners together, shared customer challenges with them, and supported them to build “for HubSpot” products. The approach worked, helping us scale from 150 partners in 2018 to over 1,200 in 2022.
Product accelerators can simultaneously create utility value for customers, revenue value for platforms, and new sources of recurring revenue for partners.
Innovation hacks
Innovation hacks are different to product accelerators, in that they help existing platform partners add value to their existing products based on well-defined customer needs. One example: a “Nielsen Hack” I organised during my time at Facebook.
At the time Nielsen and Facebook had a shared problem. Brand advertisers were spending more on Facebook but hadn’t yet adopted Nielsen's brand measurement solution - Online Campaign Ratings. So they couldn’t prove the value of their ad spend.
Tagging OCR campaigns was a very manual process. Reporting was cumbersome.
And, inadvertently adding more friction, Nielsen had demanded a five-figure API access fee from our Marketing API partners before they could even attempt to build solutions with it. Partners needed a strong incentive - and support - to even consider it.
It was classic chicken-and-egg. Nielsen needed partners to build OCR solutions before brands could adopt it. Facebook needed OCR to prove the effectiveness of brand campaigns. Partners needed support from Nielsen and Facebook before committing.
The solution was simple. In exchange for partner commitments, we organized a hack day to co-build OCR integrations with partners. Nielsen waived API access fees and put up financial incentives for winners. Facebook provided advertising credits.
Through the innovation hack format, partners like Adaptly and Makemereach co-built effective solutions to automate tagging and reporting of Nielsen OCR campaigns. Which put them in a unique position to win new, high spending brand advertisers.
How to make co-building with partners work
The specifics of co-build approaches are different, but the fundamentals are the same.
Start by identifying customer problems that neither company can solve alone. This may sound obvious, but most failed partnerships start to fail here. Point to a specific customer pain point that co-building will solve, and prioritize partners based on this.
Know how you’ll measure success before you start. User engagement growth, revenue growth, or something - decide this upfront, and link it back to the problem you’ve identified. When asked about the impact of these partnerships, have an answer ready.
Commit real resources - including product and engineering - or don’t bother. Co-building isn’t a side project. It needs dedicated people and time from everyone involved. Half-measures produce half-baked products that help nobody.
Where to start
Most platforms already have strong foundations to co-build with partners. If you're running channel or affiliate programs, you already have relationships with a growing number of partners. Co-building expands the scope of those existing partnerships.
Here’s how to get started:
Based on co-build goals, pick the most relevant 3-5 partners. The ones where you already have working relationships and aligned incentives. Ask them a simple question: “How can we co-build solutions to these customer problems together?”
You’ll be surprised by how great their answers will be. Partners already talk to your shared customers every day. They often already see clear gaps that neither company is addressing. They often already have products and features in mind - great ones.
Start small, with one co-built feature or product and a handful of partners. Something small enough to ship quickly but meaningful enough to measure the impact of. Prove co-building works, then scale what’s successful - and operationalize it.
Companies that figure this out - combining product co-building with traditional partnership motions - can quickly separate themselves from competitors who only think about partnerships as distribution channels.
Wiz already proved it works. Now it’s your turn.
If you enjoyed reading this post - or would like to ask me a question - comment below or reach out to me on LinkedIn.