Anna Kohnen

Successful tech partnership programs require a balance of Strategy, Partner Selection + User Experience, and GTM + Enablement. There are common pitfalls in each of those respective areas, including: - Strategy: Lack of roadmap alignment. Make sure the partnerships you’re pursuing complement your company’s product roadmap, augment the user experience, and are positioned to accelerate progress toward specific goals. Set joint success metrics for tech partnerships with your product team. - Partner Selection + User Experience: Prioritizing quantity over quality. Think of each tech partnership or integration like a product feature. You want to create great product experiences between your software and your partners’ software, and it’s easy to get distracted with vanity metrics like the quantity of integrations you’ve built over meaningful quality, user experience, and adoption. - GTM + Enablement: Under-utilizing marketing. Driving awareness is key to driving adoption of your partner integrations. In-house enablement for customer-facing teams, external-facing partner marketing tactics, and co-marketing with tech partners are all opportunities you don’t want to miss

At Figma, we often mirror the tactics that our product and GTM teams use to drive adoption of native features - but partner integrations also have the benefit of leveraging partner data and co-marketing opportunities for a multiplier effect. Data is so valuable here! Examine the characteristics of customers who use existing integrations and work with your marketing and customer-facing teams to communicate the value of other integrations with these customers. When you launch a new integration, refer back to any data you have around customers’ requests and follow up with them directly. Educate your sales and customer-facing teams about existing and upcoming integrations, turning them into advocates for integrations with their customers. Strategic co-marketing is also a leading driver of adoption. Explore in-product prompting across both platforms to drive awareness of the features. Work with your partners to understand overlapping customers and prospects, and then target these users together via joint case studies, webinars, and events. You can also leverage your other partners for co-marketing! Services, consultants, and other distribution partners are champions for integrations. Our partners are often working alongside our customers inside Figma’s platform, and they can recommend workflows and integrations from the inside. These partners are often a great resource for integration feedback and requests too.

First, decide what you want to accomplish with tech partners. What are your product and business goals and how can partners contribute? Partners can fill gaps or extend functionality and personalization that your own team doesn’t plan to address directly. For example, communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are useful integrations for Figma users because notifications and conversations about work are happening within those platforms. These integrations engage a broad audience, extend collaboration workflows, and help direct users back into Figma’s platform. Great tech partners can also help accelerate or provide access to a new user base. When Figma launched Dev Mode, our new product for developers, it was important for us to partner with tools that developers already know and love, like GitHub, VSCode, Jira, and Linear. Meeting developers in the tools they’re already using helps create a tighter connection between their design and development workflows. Tech partnerships won’t flourish without a clear value proposition for each partner and the intended users; it’s important to be explicit about your own goals, your partners’ goals, and the value you create for users together.

We market integrations similarly to the way we market any given product feature. Building a partner marketing muscle within our product marketing team has been critical to driving awareness and adoption of integrations. Partner managers can help advocate for the value of the integration, while the marketing team can ensure the opportunity ladders up to their broader org’s objectives. Co-marketing can have a multiplier effect here too - joint customer stories, case studies, webinars, and events have high ROI when done well! At Config, Figma’s annual user conference, our partners get involved through sponsorships, speaking opportunities, targeted launch moments, and more.

Partner managers are partner experts and advocates, internally and externally. To improve tech partner adoption, the best partner managers should: - Test and use their partners’ products. They develop expertise on the integration value prop in order to effectively advocate for their partners. Product knowledge also puts them in a position to give feedback on the product experience. Is the setup too onerous? Is there a bug in the oauth flow? These are all things that could be hindering adoption, and partner managers should be well-positioned to identify them. - Be curious about the data, dive into dashboards, and use tangible metrics to set joint goals with internal teams and partners. - Collaborate closely with marketing to understand campaigns and other initiatives where partners might fit in. For example, if we’re producing a customer story and that customer is a heavy user of integrations, let’s dig into that as part of the story! - Educate and advocate internally. For example, partner managers should proactively set up partner office hours for sales and marketing teams, and proactively create collateral and follow up. They’ll also frequently connect 1:1 with account owners for large opportunities where integrations play a key role.

…All of them. This is a catchall answer, but it’s true - partnerships have the potential to touch almost every area of the business, and as partner leaders, it’s important for us to understand each team leader’s goals and build a cohesive narrative. For example: - Product leaders tend to care about user journeys, experience, engagement, and adoption. Product integrations should be built to meet customers’ needs; a focus on solving real user problems with integrations will resonate with product leaders here. Strong integrations drive user engagement across your platform, so there’s a win-win. - Marketing leaders often care about top-of-funnel, brand awareness, storytelling, and building credibility with different customer bases. Demonstrating how partners can help contribute to these goals by activating their audiences will resonate with marketing leaders. - Sales leaders care about meeting customers’ needs and the revenue those customers generate. If a partner integration helps meet a customer requirement or influence a deal, that real impact on revenue will resonate.

Metrics will differ based on your partnership team’s goals (see notes above on metrics like total user engagement, influenced revenue, etc.). Demonstrating quantifiable impact that aligns with stated company goals is most important here, coupled with clear customer stories and examples that back up the value of your partner program. A good exercise here is to take materials that outline your company’s goals and overlay your partner program’s contribution(s) to each relevant area. You also want to be clear on the expected outcome from an increased investment in partner budget; if partner budget is increased, what can leaders expect and why does that matter to them? Be clear and realistic on the upside, downside, and risks associated with increasing partner spend.