You're navigating a partnership. How can you prevent potential issues from escalating?

The key to a successful partnership is clear and frequent communication. It's important to over-communicate to ensure both parties are aligned on goals, vision and approaches throughout the journey. Regular follow ups can help catch issues early before they escalate. You have to be always open and transparent about any concerns, and make sure to listen to your partners perspective. This will help you build trust and address problems together as they arise.

It's very important to agree on your roles from the start. Each partner should know their responsibilities and how they align efforts toward a shared goal. This helps you understand how each role affects the other, and ensure smooth coordination. Clear roles prevent confusion and overlap, and allows the partnership to function efficiently. When everyone knows their part, the team can work together seamlessly.

Most conflicts happen because of high expectations from the other party. Once we have a clear goal and aligned vision, we can manage expectations from our partner effectively. To do this, we must also agree on our roles and understand how they interact with and affect each other. To set clear expectations, we must define success benchmarks for progress and understand responsibilities. This minimizes misunderstandings and ensures everyone is working toward the same goals smoothly.

Regular business reviews or partnership planning is critical to any successful partnership similar to account management or customer success plans. Concurrent with regular reviews, successful partnerships benefit from flexibility to accomodate business landscape changes at times as opportunities may present themselves but won't necessarily be available for ever. Having the frameworks, guardrails, strategic dialogue and governance rhythms that regularly discuss changes will position the partnership well. Mechanisms to monitor success, pivot in direction or potentially cut ties and reduce time wastage and frustration should the original partnerships thesis no longer hold, are also valuable to incorporate.

Some of the best pilot partnership initiatives I have witnessed were borne from partnership leads on both sides agreeing on when to stop wasting time on something that isn't working or delivering joint value and either pivot to another use case or opportunity or disolve the partnership altogether. Key to this is ensuring your team has a catalogue of learnings, metrics, outcomes and documented reasoning for these decisions in a CRM etc as it is gold for those that come after you and may try the exact same initiative without the insight this information could have provided to reduce time wastage.