A few weeks ago, we recorded an episode of the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast with Asher Mathew, co-founder and CEO of Partnership Leaders. The episode will air on our podcast on Tuesday, February 18th, and was riddled with key insights about thinking about partnership strategies in modern business.

Asher’s frameworks offer a clear perspective and resonate greatly with Boundaryless’ organizational and portfolio practice. In anticipation of the episode’s release, we considered offering a preview and a structured reflection.

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Partnerships as a Core Strategic Function

One of the most striking insights from the conversation is how partnerships have evolved from merely a (optional) sales channel to a core strategic function and pillar of any organization. According to Mathew, partnership strategy needs to be owned by the founder/CEO in the early stages of a company, as it’s fundamental to business design. It also needs an intentional framing, as it can widely influence the success outcomes of a product rather than just being a sales and marketing initiative.

This represents a significant shift from the traditional view where partnerships were often seen as a last resort when sales targets weren’t being met. Instead, Mathew argues that partnership strategy should be part of the initial business design, focusing on delivering value to customers most effectively. This way of framing partnership so crucially is particularly resonant with a previous conversation we had with Scott Brinker on our Podcast, where he seemed to hint that Hubspot customer research always focuses on understanding what he calls “joint customer needs,” i.e., understanding how complex customer needs span across products instead of thinking about Hubspot in isolation.

 

 

The Four Dimensions of Partnership Value

Mathew presents a compellingly simple framework for understanding how partnerships can augment a company’s direct model across four key dimensions:

• Build: Partnerships that help create and enhance products
• Market: Partnerships that expand market reach
• Sell: Partnerships that facilitate sales
• Service: Partnerships that improve customer service and support

This framework aligns partnerships with the core functions of any business: creating a product, marketing it, selling it, and servicing it. It provides a systematic way to consider where and how partnerships can add value to your business model. Of course, another thing that thinking about partnerships in this sense does is push you to understand where you intentionally decide to make a difference.

 

 

Commercial Models for Partnerships

Another crucial and complementary framework Mathew shared outlines four main commercial models for partnerships;

• Referral: Partners refer opportunities and receive a fee for successful deals
• Resell: Partners sell your product alongside theirs, with customers aware of both brands
• Co-sell: Both companies target accounts together, sharing notes and potential revenue
• OEM/White Label: Partners sell your product under their brand

Each model serves different strategic objectives and fits different market contexts, providing a clear structure for deciding how to formalize partnership arrangements.

The Hyperscaler Reality

Perhaps most importantly, Mathew emphasizes a crucial reality of today’s digital markets: the role of hyperscalers (major cloud platforms and marketplaces) in distribution strategy. He argues that modern companies must carefully consider which ecosystem they’ll play in, as this decision becomes fundamental to their go-to-market strategy.

Such an insight challenges the traditional notion of building independent distribution channels and solving the go-to-market on your own: a game that risks being about outspending your competitors in a particularly challenging market where – incidentally – customer acquisition costs are rising, and the existing traditional paid acquisition channels are withering or being outsmarted by AIs (think about SEO). Instead, Mathew suggests that the most efficient path to market often involves leveraging existing platform ecosystems rather than building new ones from scratch.

Key Takeaways

Based on Mathew’s insights, several key points emerge:

• Partnership strategy should be part of the initial business design, not an afterthought
• Modern partnerships should be evaluated across build, market, sell, and service dimensions
• One should choose partnership models (referral, resell, co-sell, or OEM) based on strategic objectives
• Your platform ecosystem strategy should be a fundamental business decision

Aligning Partnership Strategy with Portfolio Thinking and Platform Organization

Mathew’s partnership frameworks align powerfully with Boundaryless’s work on portfolio thinking and platform organization, mainly through two key lenses: capability mapping and organizational adaptability.

First, Mathew’s framework of build, market, sell, and service provides a structured way to think about partnership opportunities. It elegantly maps onto the upcoming Boundaryless Portfolio Map Canvas, which helps organizations visualize, understand, and modularize their capabilities, identify core ones, and thus facilitate choices on strategic partnership opportunities.

The Portfolio Map Canvas is a visual tool designed to help organizations map customer needs, align Go-To-Market strategies, structure product portfolios, and clarify internal dependencies. This framework helps teams identify gaps, streamline offerings, and ensure organizational capabilities support business objectives. The Canvas integrates Portfolio Strategy with Platform Organization design, making it essential for scaling multi-product businesses efficiently.

Boundaryless is about to release the Portfolio Map Canvas in Creative Commons; if you don’t want to miss the release, subscribe to our newsletter here, our Telegram News Channel.

The alignment becomes clear when we look at how these elements interact:

• Build and Service capabilities typically relate to an organization’s core operational strengths (product units and shared enabling nodes such as Service Desk units)
• Market and Sell functions often connect to go-to-market strategies and the bundling/modularity of products and capabilities

As the Portfolio Map will enable organizations to identify their core capabilities, clearly, this will make it easier to understand where partnerships can enhance or extend these capabilities. Making strategic decisions about which capabilities to own versus which ones to access through partnerships will be easier, and partnerships will be, in turn, aligned with the capability portfolio.

This systematic approach to capability mapping helps organizations make more strategic partnership decisions, moving beyond opportunistic partnerships to intentional ecosystem design.

Platform Organization: Enabling Diverse Go-to-Market Strategies

Furthermore, the platform organization model, mainly through its Micro Enterprise (ME) concept, offers a robust framework addressing a crucial challenge related to bringing modular products to market with the flexibility of channel, strategy, and partnership models.

The platform organization model enables this flexibility in several key ways. First, it enables adaptiveness in product strategies within a portfolio: some products might aim to become “systems of record” with ambitious platform aspirations, while others might function as agile “plug-ins” for larger platforms. The ME structure supports both approaches simultaneously in the same organization: MEs are autonomous in management and strategy, they don’t have to rely on the same marketing and sales approach, and they can be quite independent in choosing how to go to market.

The organizational agility that derives from this produces a situation that is radically different from what would happen in monolithic, functional organizations where bureaucratic overhead can stifle innovation by constraining everyone to the same go-to-market choices. In traditional organizations, too many elements of the product portfolio are often bundled due to organizational rigidities and untangled dependencies; in a platform organization, instead, MEs remain lean and autonomous.

This allows each unit to:

• Adopt partnership strategies that fit their specific market context
• Maintain the agility needed for plugin-style partnerships
• Pursue more ambitious platform strategies when appropriate

In a few words, the ME structure typical of the Platform Organization model enables organizations to maintain different branding and go-to-market strategies for different products and services, matching the partnership model to the market opportunity.

What emerges from our conversation with Asher is that the Platform Organization model’s organizational flexibility appears crucial in today’s market: success often requires participating in multiple ecosystems simultaneously while maintaining the option to build platform positions in specific domains.

In conclusion, Mathew’s frameworks provide a structured way to think about partnerships in modern markets, complementing and reinforcing key principles of portfolio thinking and platform organization. Together, these perspectives offer a comprehensive way to design businesses that can thrive in increasingly interconnected markets.

 

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This blog post is based on insights from Asher Mathew’s appearance on the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. For the entire conversation and more insights on portfolio thinking and platform organization, visit boundaryless.io/resources/podcast