[IxDA Discuss] user centered design -> overlapping circles -> boundary selection -> platform strategies

[Michael Micheletti]

Hi Eugene,

The next may sound obvious, but it turns out to be really hard to execute
well. When you develop a partner network, you need to offer products or
services that benefit your partners. If you offer them a packaged product,
it will cost a lot of money and take training, integration, hop-on-board
time. If you offer them an API, someone needs to design/code/test/integrate
with it, and before they do this they need to learn how it all works -
typically a non-trivial task. I suggest that you figure out which of your
possible directions provide the greatest benefit for your customers and
partners and take that route, because your customers will be weighing
pain-vs-gain prior to purchase.

If you have the resources, you can try multiple approaches. Our company has
both finished products and an engine/API to offer partners, and each new
partnership is an extended courtship to determine the best approach.
Sometimes our new partner is a systems integrator with a lot of experience
and credibility in a single market, and they end up using our API to craft
solutions that surprise us. Other times a customer can work with our
products right out of the box. This dual approach has worked for us, at a
cost of a lot of hard work.

Michael Micheletti

On 10/8/06, Eugene Chen <eugene at eugenechendesign.com> wrote:
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> Anyone have any experiences with any of the above strategies?
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> Eugene
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