Your First 30 Days as a Platform Partner Manager
Build a baseline understanding before you do anything else.
Most partner management advice focuses on traditional B2B partnerships: agencies, affiliates, and channel partnerships. But if you’re stepping into a platform partner manager role focused on managing technology partners at a platform company like Meta, Shopify, or Salesforce, your first month will look completely different.
Technology (or product) focused platform partnerships are a different beast. You’re not just managing one-to-one relationships with a handful of strategic “market maker” partners. You’ll also need to navigate and prioritise a fast-growing ecosystem of hundreds (or thousands!) of developers, ISVs, and technology partners building on top of your platform.
The playbook is different, the data available will (probably) be far less mature, and your stakeholders will span every corner of your company.
Here’s what I’ve found to work well in the first 30 days.
Week 1: Map internal stakeholders and org charts
Your biggest initial challenge isn’t understanding your partners - it’s understanding the culture, rituals, and nomenclature of your own company. Platform partnerships teams interact with and collaborate with product, engineering, legal, sales, marketing, developer relations teams - and often multiple business units and geos.
Every team has their own priorities, success metrics, and opinions about what partners should be doing. You should learn what these are as quickly as you can.
It’s usually best to start with product and engineering. These teams control the platform roadmap, API changes, and developer experience - if they didn’t exist, the platform wouldn’t exist! A breaking change could negatively influence partner relationships you’ve spent months building. So get to know your peers in product and engineering quickly, understand how they view partners, and understand any biases (positive or negative) they have about partners as quickly as you can.
Next, focus on go-to-market teams. Direct sales and agency teams are probably already recommending partners to customers, whether you know it (or like it) or not. Marketing could be co-marketing with the wrong partners because they lack clear visibility into which partners are strong or weak. Legal is probably already fielding partner questions about policies, violations, and everything in-between.
You need to understand the current state before you can influence the future state.
Don’t try to meet everyone all at once. Focus on leaders within each group who can help you understand how they work with partners today, and how they’d ideally like to work with them in the future.
Week 2: Find the data (or admit it doesn’t exist)
Most platform partnership programs are flying blind in the early days. When I joined Facebook’s Marketing API team, we knew which partners were generating revenue through the Ads API, but we had no idea which partners were most popular by region, vertical, or agency type. When I joined the partnerships team at HubSpot, we weren’t yet using our own CRM to track and manage our partner pipeline.
“Where’s the data?” should be the first question you ask.
Your job isn’t to have perfect data - it’s to understand what data exists, where it lives, and what’s missing. Start with the basics: which are our top partners by revenue/install impact? By vertical? By geo? Which partners are growing fast? Which partners are static or declining?
If you can’t initially answer these questions, it’s not a failure - it just becomes one of your first projects. Build a baseline data understanding before you do anything else.
Week 3: Separate the signal from the noise
Every platform ecosystem is populated with partners who talk a big game but deliver little value. The most vocal partners are often the least loved by customers. They might have strong go-to-market engines but often offer weak products and support.
Meanwhile, your most valuable partners might be completely invisible. They’re humbly and quietly serving your customers by building reliable products, supporting them well, and helping your platform win new revenue - but they’re not loudly showing up at your events or flooding your inbox with endless asks.
Your job is to identify both groups. Loud partners usually need management and education about what a “good” partnership looks like. Quiet partners usually need an advocate - you - to invest in and support them to scale their impact.
Week 4: Control the controllables
You’re new. You can’t change everything all at once. Sales teams will continue to recommend partners that are top of mind for them. Let them. Product teams will still prioritize feature requests for tangible, revenue generating products over API change requests from partners. Let them. They know their world better than you do.
But you can start to influence them and collaborate with them. Create simple tools and dashboards to surface data and insights that make it easier for sales teams to recommend the right partners. It’s in their interest to do this. Build feedback loops that help product teams understand the impact partners have on the revenue and engagement growth of their products. It’s in their interest to know this.
It’s your job to help your colleagues understand how partners can help - not hinder - them and the growth of their pipeline and products. Focus your energy productively.
Find your quick wins
Again, you’re new. But your peers - and leadership - will want to see quick progress. Your teammates will need to understand the value you’re adding, so they know they made a great hiring decision.
Identify 2-3 projects you can execute quickly that demonstrate a tangible impact.
That impact can be as simple as helping them know something they didn’t know before you showed up. The data and tools you build for yourself can help them too.
Example: one of my first - quick - projects at Facebook, was to build a simple Tableau dashboard that helped UK/Ireland agency teams understand which Ads API partners the major agency holding companies they worked with were using. They’d never had this visibility before, and it immediately changed their conversations with these agencies and influenced which partners these agencies collaborated with.
Quick wins should solve real problems for the people you’ll collaborate with every day. They can also generate data and insights that inform your longer-term strategy.
Your first 30 days lay the foundations
Platform partnership management isn’t just about managing relationships - it’s also about designing systems that scale and enable thousands of relationships to thrive.
Systems are foundations. Map the organization, find data, understand partners, control what you can, and demonstrate tangible value as quickly as you can.
Your partners - and your colleagues - are counting on you to get it right.
If you enjoyed reading this post - or would like to ask me a question - comment below or reach out to me on LinkedIn.