If you are looking to expand your tech ecosystem, then you’re likely in need of a Technology Partnerships Manager.
A good Technology Partnerships Manager can be a strong advocate for your product and successfully identify the tech partnerships that will drive the most revenue and retention.
But this role requires a different skill set than a channel partner manager, whose responsibilities overlap more heavily with sales.
We have identified 5 key qualities that we believe to be especially important to look for when hiring a Technology Partnerships Manager.
We also provide potential interview questions and answers that you can use during the interview process to assess candidates’ level of skill and experience in these areas.
Your Technology Partnerships Manager will be responsible for identifying and acquiring new integration partnerships that align with your company’s mission and product strategy. To be successful in this area they should have a systemic process and approach to partnerships and relationship management.
This includes the ability to develop a strong understanding of your product’s functionality, customers, and roadmap to identify opportunities.
You’ll want someone who knows that conducting market research and staying current on product developments and releases is key to identifying these opportunities. All in all, they should be able to describe a framework for finding new partners, and identifying whether a potential partner’s product solution and integrations align with your SaaS product in a way that meets your strategic objectives.
When it comes to systemic processes for relationship management, they’ll need to know how important leveraging existing partner and customer resources are when it comes to targeting new clients and opportunities. You’ll want someone who understands that providing value to your customers and existing partners can help drive new opportunities and referrals, and they’ll have processes in mind for leveraging and nurturing these relationships.
Related Content: Advice for How to Tackle Technology Partner Operations
Your Tech Partnership Manager should have strong data analysis skills. They should be keen on determining and understanding the type of data that is needed to analyze the success of product integrations and partnerships.
They will ultimately be responsible for analyzing the performance of your tech partnerships, and this will include tracking goals and data such as the number of leads registered, conversion rates, partner performance analytics, app analytics, cost per lead, CLV, churn rate etc.
From this information, they should be able to identify useful insights that can further guide business and product strategy.
Additionally, your technology partnerships manager should be skilled at storytelling around the impact of your product, and this requires a foundation in not only qualitative examples, but having a close pulse on quantitative data around program success.
You’ll want someone who has clear processes and software in mind that they can use to track and analyze this performance. In the interview, you could have the candidate speak to a time they tracked and measured against a goal, or have them speak to a time where they performed a data analysis and had to iterate their business or product strategy according to the results.
Having a Tech Partnerships Manager with some technical knowledge will help ensure your organization is wisely spending their engineering resources, and building an infrastructure that allows you to drive more revenue from your partnerships.
When it comes to APIs, they should know about the different types of APIs (private, partner, and open) and the general protocols and architecture of APIs that are most commonly used to build SaaS integrations.
They should also understand at minimum what a product integration is, how it’s different from an API, the important components for a product integration, and different tools available for creating SaaS product integrations. (If you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into the technical knowledge useful for someone in this position, consult our Integration Handbook for Partnerships Leaders.)
Related Content: SaaS Integrations 101: Advice and Best Practices From a Sr. Engineer
Because your Technology Partnerships Manager will be someone tasked with identifying new integration partners, they should be able to explain the rationale of product decisions. You’ll want someone who can demonstrate that when making product partnership decisions, they keep the business objectives, user problems, and solutions to those problems at the forefront.
This includes, but is not limited to, the ability to use your company’s business objectives and integration strategy to identify potential partners and create joint use case stories. You’ll also want someone who can use internal and external resources to better understand the customer journey and identify customer problems that could be solved with a partner solution.
An ideal Tech Partnerships Manager will use these skills to be a strong customer advocate. They will understand that it can really make or break your reputation with customers if they feel like their needs aren’t being met, or if there isn’t clear communication about issues or delays. You’ll want someone who is dedicated to balancing business objectives with the desire to give the best customer experience.
Having a background in a customer success role working with integrations can potentially signal strong skills in this area, as individuals with this experience will have been involved in the product, understand what it takes to execute on integrations, and have experience working 1:1 with integration customers.
A Technology Partnerships Manager is a highly collaborative role. This person will have to work closely and communicate with many departments and teams internally and externally. They should be someone who understands how to not only communicate clearly but has the ability to create elaborate and effective processes and systems for communication.
This person will have to communicate with multiple teams about what your partnerships entail, and goals aligned to these partnerships, across teams like sales, marketing, demand generation, product, legal, and customer success. They’ll also be expected to utilize these skills to mediate between external and internal stakeholders.
The success of a tech partnerships program relies on alignment around goals and objectives for all of these departments, and so you’ll want to get a sense of how methodological your potential Tech Partnerships Manager is when it comes to creating clear systems for communicating items like this across multiple teams and stakeholders.
Ultimately, good Technology Partnerships Managers possess a strong cross-functional skillset, from a keen product sense to the ability to effectively manage external and internal relationships.
Interview questions should help determine whether the potential candidate possesses this breadth of skills and is a process-driven problem solver. Having candidates describe specific examples from their own career, give their thoughts on potential scenarios, and asking them how they would tackle trade offs you're currently facing will further demonstrate their skillset.
To get more information on different roles involved in Technology Partnerships and the responsibilities associated, check out our “Sample Job Descriptions” page here.
