Why Great Partner Managers Make Great Product Managers (And Vice Versa)
The skills transfer more cleanly than most people realize.
I've been building products on the internet since I was a teenager (hint: for over two decades), but it was my first role as a Partner Manager on the Marketing API team at Facebook (now Meta) that laid the foundation for an “official” transition into product management at Intercom and Zalando.
After all that, I circled back into partner management for 4 years at HubSpot.
And then back into product management after that.
I’m not the only person to switch between partner and product management roles. I’ve been lucky to collaborate with many great partner and product managers that all seemed to share similar DNA with each other, and rotated between partner management and product management roles.
Here’s four traits they had in common.
They know how to say no (or not now)
Great partner managers live in a world of infinite opportunity and finite resources. Sales wants you to fast-track that partner integration that might close their biggest deal. Leadership has opinions based on other leaders they met at conferences and retreats. Every week brings a new “must-have” integration or partnership request.
The inexperienced partner manager tries to say “yes” to everything (and to please everyone). Great partner managers master the art of saying “no” - or more diplomatically, “not now.” They understand that every “yes” to a mediocre opportunity is a “no” to an opportunity that could be much more impactful.
Great product managers manage the same dynamics gracefully. Feature requests flood in from customers, sales, support, and leadership. The temptation is to build everything, and please everyone. But there’s discipline in knowing what not to build.
Great partner and product managers ruthlessly prioritize, and deliver with diplomacy.
They’re roadmap influencers
Here's something I realized early in my Facebook journey: platform partner managers are effectively external-influencing product managers. These partner managers don’t just manage relationships - they influence what partners build, how they build it, and when they build it. They also help partners understand what not to build.
More than a few great partner managers I worked with at Facebook have since carved out successful careers in product management. Example: one of my teammates at Facebook, Sachin Monga, moved from partner management to product management at Facebook - and is now VP of Product at Substack - where this newsletter lives!
Sachin and I were - separately, but at the same time - trying to influence the roadmaps of Shopify and Wix. We had to convince them to integrate Facebook Ad buying with their platforms in creative ways, to make it easier for millions of SMBs to advertise.
This isn’t dissimilar to what product managers do internally with engineering, design, and go-to-market teams. Partner managers just do it with external teams and orgs.
Same skills, different audience.
They lean on intuition (and data)
Some of the best partners my teams and I worked with over the years looked unremarkable at first. They were quiet, humble, hardworking and under-the-radar - but became some of the most innovative and impactful players in their ecosystems.
Often the data didn’t tell a super compelling story about them in the early days. Their teams were small. They weren’t super well funded. They had a handful of customers.
Smartly was one of these partners. When we became aware of them in 2013, they were a tiny team based out of Finland. They had little funding and barely any customers compared with other Facebook Marketing API partners. But they were humble and hardworking.
They didn’t show up with asks - they showed up with questions. Great questions. Questions focused on helping customers, not Smartly. They acted on the answers fast.
They quickly displaced ecosystem incumbents, becoming Facebook’s biggest Ads API partner. And, within 6 years, they achieved one of the biggest ecosystem exits ever.
If we relied purely on “qualification” metrics - like company size, funding, and customer overlap - we wouldn’t have prioritized working with them. Great partner managers develop a sixth sense - an intuition - for potential. They spot the signals that data can’t capture: hunger, humility, technical curiosity, and customer obsession.
Great product managers flex the same intuitive muscle. You can A/B test your way to incremental improvements, but breakthrough products often start with a hunch that defies conventional wisdom. The data helps you validate and iterate, but intuition points you toward what’s worth building in the first place.
They’re human Swiss army knives
Partner managers rarely have dedicated resources for everything they need. Want to get a new integration built? Product and engineering teams already have a long list of priorities. Planning a co-marketing campaign? You’re negotiating with the marketing team’s priorities. Better partner analytics? Join the product analytics or RevOps queue.
Great partner managers are usually generalists who can zoom out to understand business strategy, zoom in to debug partner issues, then jump into crafting messaging for a partner launch. Context switching isn’t just a skill - it’s table stakes.
Instead of building that integration, or lobbying a partner to build it, can’t we co-fund it? Instead of a co-marketing campaign, can we rally the internal troops to amplify the launch of a partner integration on social media? What’s a “something is better than nothing” approach to partner analytics? How do we get from 0 to 1 with no budget?
Great product managers operate in the same multidisciplinary reality. One moment they’re conducting user research, the next they’re facilitating technical architecture discussion, before communicating product launch plans to leadership. These days, great product managers use platforms like Lovable to quickly build and test ideas.
Great partner managers and product managers thrive in - and embrace - ambiguity.
Partner managers are product managers in disguise
If you’re a great partner manager, you’re already a product manager in disguise. If you’re a great product manager, you’re also a strong fit for a career in partnerships.
Both roles sit at the intersection of business strategy and technical execution. Both require translating vision into reality across organizational boundaries. Both demand a combination of strategic thinking, tactical execution, and diplomacy.
The skills transfer more cleanly than most people realize. What changes is context - internal teams vs external partners, direct control vs influence-based leadership.
If you enjoyed reading this post - or would like to ask me a question - comment below or reach out to me on LinkedIn.