To reach a new level of orbit with your organization’s technology, you need a crack internal Technology Accelerator Team (a.k.a. Digital Product Team), but you ALSO need terrific external partners.

This combination of a terrific internal product team owning the strategy and internal communications, buy-in, training, and support — together with terrific external partners who bring expertise on the vast options out there and needed skills — is how you truly make magic with your technology. In the end, internal and external will be less important. You will become one big team, and just like you need to find the right people for the people for your internal team, you need to find the right people to be your external collaborators.  

So, when deciding who you will work with, remember the specific team of people you’re going to work with is what matters most. The firm or agency certainly matters, because great firms often have strong processes to attract and retain great people. But keep in mind that many firms have terrific principals or skilled salespeople, and that they’re not the people showing up day after day to deliver on your work. We’ve all experienced the difference between having someone good on your project, and having someone great on it. It took us a long time to realize we needed to meet the specific people doing the day-to-day work BEFORE we agreed to work together with the firm.

Don’t rely on RFPs

Finding the right partner to make magic with requires time and care. Crafting an RFP might be helpful to force you to talk to all your stakeholders and pull together an idea for what you think you want. However, there are well known pitfalls to the RFP process, which include:

1. By over-imagining an end state you may be locking the path on a lesser north star. The value of working with experts is precisely that they will bring ideas you will not have thought of, and it’s often much better to try to identify, together, a minimum viable starting point, and allocate plenty of budget to take it from there based on what you learn as you go. 

2. If you tie yourself to scope,  you are playing the wrong game. If you’re thinking, “I need this, just this, and that’s it,” you are likely misunderstanding the nature of technology today. You may think you’re aiming for some ideal or even barely acceptable end-state, but there is no end state. You must begin a path of perpetual improvement and find great partners for the journey. 

3.  If you’re quickly scanning to the pricing page when it’s time to pretend you’re doing a real comparison, the whole preparation was likely a waste of your time and theirs. And we’ve seen and heard from more people than we can count that the option initially chosen for cost reasons regularly vastly under-delivered on the overall goal of the project. In those cases organizations end up spending much more just to get to something minimally acceptable in the end. Ask around and you’ll hear plenty of examples of this. 

So if not RFPs, then how do you find a great partner? Well, word of mouth is one effective tool. Ask around until you find someone who LOVES their partner, and then have a conversation with them to understand the details. What works? Who specifically do they work with? What techniques have they learned to get the best out of the relationship?

What else?

In addition, we’ve identified a number of factors that we have found are key to healthy, productive client-partner collaborations, which we’ll lay out below. You can also watch this talk from a Salesforce partners conference that covers these points in the context of work in Salesforce.

A truly agile process

Your work together must use a *truly* agile process. Most firms nowadays either incorporate some element of an agile process in their work, or can at least talk a decent game about it. But here’s one test: does the agency require a change order when you add a requirement or change your mind about something? If so, that’s not working in an agile way. Scope creep is a foolish term that aims to protect the wrong target. Scope will evolve as you build and you test and you use. And it should. This is the nature of the work. 

It’s true that ever-changing scope is an awkward fit for most budget processes and project timelines. Executives and management need certainty in order to plan! You were supposed to somehow guess last year during budget planning how much this project was going to cost, without even quite knowing what you would end up building. We realize this is awkward and there aren’t great answers to this, perhaps besides unabashedly embracing the uncertainty and padding budgets. 

And yet this is the absolute truth of how great work happens. You simply can’t know what you need to know to make choices until you’re in the midst of the work. And you NEED the flexibility to make strategic choices between options as they emerge -- EVEN if they might increase project cost. Don’t rob yourself of a potentially game-changing adjustment that presents itself, simply because you didn’t predict it would be there. That’s betting against your own success! If increasing budget simply isn’t an option, then effective prioritization serves as your protection -- take the new win and de-prioritize something else. This is the very essence of working in an agile manner. Both the organization and the partner must build their process and expectations around this reality, or once again fumble their attempts at game-changing technology interventions by kneecapping them before they’ve seen the light of day.  

The virtuous braintrust

When it comes to working together, you’re looking to create what we call a “virtuous braintrust” of skilled, thoughtful people working together at the table. The organization and the partner should be on the same team, working together towards interventions that change the game for the cause they are pursuing. That means that everyone relevant should be at the table when appropriate. Partners shouldn’t hide their skilled experts and clients shouldn’t hide their executives behind product managers on both sides, making everyone play games of telephone where critical nuances are lost in translation. Sure, there may be many meetings when not everyone needs to be present. But there should be no reluctance to get people on a call together when needed, so the work product can be maximized. 

Thoughtfulness and healthy discussion

Once everyone is at the table, you also want a partner that embraces thoughtfulness and healthy discussion. What you don’t want is a partner (or specific partner staff) with a shred of defensiveness, or the mistaken impression they need to appear to be a complete expert on every single thing that is thrown their way, or who sees suggestions for improvement as some sort of challenge to their expertise. If everyone is on the same team, everyone on all sides should be happy to have questions posed, ideas raised, roads explored, until everyone is satisfied that the group has landed on the best course of action.

Seeking out feedback

Extra bonus points go to partners who actively seek feedback and constantly want to improve their own offering. It’s an important sign of humility in approach, of health in their processes, and in how much they care about achieving greatness together with you rather than just clocking in so they can cash your next check.

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If you look at the list of factors above and feel a little overwhelmed, that’s certainly understandable. It’s easy to see why, by comparison, it’s tempting to just write up an RFP, cast it out on a listserve, and wait for the order-takers to deliver their proposals. But is it any wonder that practice so often fails to deliver real value?

Remember, digital products are ever-evolving. And as such, a partner relationship should be an ongoing relationship too, beyond the initial project. You are guaranteed to need more out of that relationship than you are envisioning at the outset. This relationship is a big deal, and it’s worth putting in the thoughtfulness and the work required to get it right.