How Partnership Teams Should Spend Their Time

What separates an effective partnerships team from an ineffective one? The ability to identify and prioritize the right opportunities. This may sound obvious, but in practice it is one of the biggest challenges every team faces. Our partnerships team at WeWork is no different and in order to ensure that we remain effective regardless if we are pursuing an outbound partnership, responding to an inbound opportunity, or facing the occasional executive tangent, I came up with the Interest-Impact Matrix.

Hat Tip to Boston Consulting Group

In the early 1970s Boston Consulting Group released its venerable Growth-Share Matrix, a mental model that allowed leaders to organize their business units across 4 category combinations based on relative market growth and relative market share. Here’s the original Growth-Share Matrix, each quadrant representing a specific combination of relative market share and growth.

• Low Growth, High Share. Companies should milk these “cash cows” for cash to reinvest.
• High Growth, High Share. Companies should significantly invest in these “stars” as they have high future potential.
• High Growth, Low Share. Companies should invest in or discard these “question marks,” depending on their chances of becoming stars.
• Low Share, Low Growth. Companies should liquidate, divest, or reposition these “dogs.”

The Interest-Impact Matrix

Inspired by the BCG Matrix, I’ve come up with the partnerships Interest-Impact Matrix, a mental model to organize partnership opportunities across 4 category combinations based on Relative Impact and Relative Interest. Relative Interest is formed by looking at an opportunity through the lens of the intellectual challenge to your team in structuring and delivering, the novelty compared to other partnerships done by your company, and the recognition it could garner from industry peers. Relative Impact is the more objective of the two and is taken by summing a partnership’s objective impact on a measurable, core business KPI.

A Word on Relative Interest

Peter Drucker famously said “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” If that’s the case why did I include Relative Interest, admittedly something that can’t be quantified, as one of the two core drivers in this matrix? In my career, I’ve seen time and time again that a team is driven into a partnership because of Relative Interest - ie. people love working on and being associated with interesting things. You (or your boss or even your boss’s boss) get wrapped up in an idea and after some digging it’s discovered all too often that the kernel of the partnership comes from someone thinking that it’s a “cool” idea. My hope is that by intersecting Relative Interest with the more measurable Relative Impact, your team will be empowered to pursue the right partnership, not just the cool one.

Cash Cows

These aren’t the sexy partnerships, but these will have the most measurable long-term impact on your business. The Cash Cows are repeatable, easily packaged, and require little explanation - no user manual needed here! From my experience, these tend to be distribution related (often, not always). Once you discover what the Cash Cows are for your business, your team should be spending the bulk of their time creating these partnerships.

Stars

The Stars are the Holy Grail for any team. These will create meaningful and measurable impact as well as be intellectually interesting to build. Your team will feel professionally fulfilled working on these, even when they get stuck - which will inevitably happen given the brain power involved in planning and launching these types of partnerships. Make sure to celebrate these Stars publicly (if appropriate) or privately with the rest of the company. Use them as teaching moments, either in-flight or post-mortem highlighting the challenges and how they were overcome. Stars can become real opportunities to grow your team’s skillset and enhance their careers. Being repeatable is not a prerequisite for a Star partnership, but a high level of Relative Interest and Relative Impact certainly is.

Question Marks

The Questions Marks are the toughest partnerships to properly identify and filter. They are relatively interesting to work on and people are excited about them - which often leads to a large resource commitment and overly optimistic projections of impact. If you think you’ve identified a Question Mark, it’s important to take a step back and apply an objective review of its Relative Impact. Ideally this happens before too many resources are committed, but at the very least, it should be done as part of a post-mortem, before any additional resources are committed and the partnership is renewed. While some Question Marks may warrant continued investment given their potential to become Stars, the vast majority of them, if objectively reviewed, should ultimately be abandoned.

Dogs

We’ve all seen the press release: 

Company A & Company B are partnering to collaborate on the future of [insert buzz word].

Once you peel back the onion, however, there’s not much substance. These partnerships typically don’t have any meaningful impact beyond a press release distribution and potential photo opp. Also, these aren’t rewarding to put together for your team and can quickly steal momentum from the more meaningful partnerships they are working on. It’s best to identify these Dogs as soon as possible and reposition them to something inspiring and meaningful - or ditch them. Launch too many Dogs and your team will quickly lose standing both internally and externally.

Conclusion

The original Boston Consulting Group Matrix first appeared in an essay series called Perspectives. It’s always been a reminder to me that every partnership can be framed as a great opportunity depending on one’s perspective. It’s your job to be thoughtful in determining which to pursue, which to invest in, which to abandon, and which to avoid altogether. Whether it’s this Interest-Impact Matrix or a close variant, I hope that you find this helpful in identifying the right partnership.

Thanks for reading!

David

David Sagalov is the Director of Strategic Partnerships for WeWork. Prior to joining WeWork, he helped start a partnerships team at Greenhouse Software. David earned his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley where his experience was focused around Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. David began his career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in the Energy & Power Group before joining Jefferies where he eventually went on to lead the High Yield Research Technology vertical. He’s also earned a Bachelor’s in Business Administration, summa cum laude, with a dual concentration in finance and international business from The George Washington University, spending a year abroad at the London School of Economics. Connect with David on LinkedIn.