The Benefits of Reporting to Sales & Best Practices for Cross-functional Collaboration

Katherine Tooley brings a unique engineering background to her role as a Technology Partnerships Manager at LogicGate, a modern risk management platform. Her journey from biomedical and maritime engineering to SaaS partnerships demonstrates how technical expertise, when paired with strong collaboration skills, becomes a powerful asset in building scalable integration ecosystems.

Why Katherine Transitioned from Engineering to Partnerships

Katherine's shift from pure engineering work came from recognizing her greatest professional strength—the ability to translate complex technical concepts into accessible conversations that resonate with business stakeholders and customers. While she excelled at the analytical and numerical aspects of engineering, she found her energy came from collaborative, customer-facing work. This realization prompted her to seek a career that could leverage both her technical foundation and her natural interpersonal strengths. At LogicGate, she now bridges sales, customer experience, and product teams to identify and implement integration solutions that genuinely serve their market base.

The Technical Knowledge Tech Partner Managers Actually Need

One of Katherine's most valuable insights is that tech partner managers don't need to understand how to build integrations—they need to understand the cost and effort required to build them. Rather than diving into API mechanics, the focus should be on grasping labor time, resource allocation, and realistic timelines. This perspective prevents teams from burning out and ensures partnership managers can advocate effectively for their product teams' capacity. Katherine recommends supplementing this knowledge with professional certificates, entry-level courses, and free resources like LinkedIn Learning to build foundational software vocabulary. The goal is competency to communicate effectively, not expertise to build features.

Staying Aligned Across Departments While Reporting to Sales

At LogicGate, Katherine reports to sales—a different structure than many tech partnership roles that sit under product. This positioned her to directly observe what features and solutions customers are requesting, giving her invaluable insight into market needs. By sitting in on technology calls and understanding API hesitations and integration documentation challenges, she became a credible bridge between sales and product teams. She intentionally built repeated interactions with product and technology teams to understand their pain points, leveraging her engineering background as a conversation starter that lent credibility to her requests. This approach helps her be the first line of defense for product teams, vetting partners before integration work begins.

Identifying Quality Partners Through API Documentation

Katherine looks for specific signals when evaluating potential technology partners. Strong indicators include well-organized API documentation, mature APIs, evidence of other successful partners in their ecosystem, and support for webhooks and bidirectional integrations. These factors reveal not just the technical maturity of the organization, but their sophistication in building reliable partnerships. Red flags include disorganized APIs and partner managers unfamiliar with basic questions about how their integrations work. These warning signs often predict integration challenges down the line and suggest limited technical support capacity from the partner organization.

KPIs That Reflect Ecosystem Value, Not Just Revenue

Rather than chasing direct revenue metrics, Katherine's team aims to build a diversified partner ecosystem that supports both current customers and future growth. Her goal is to have two to three quality partners in each area of their technology roadmap, creating coverage across capabilities they either don't want to build themselves or where partnerships add stickier solutions for customers. Lead generation flows from selecting the right partners, not from arbitrary revenue targets. This approach requires organizational alignment on the value of partnerships, which Katherine credits to strong leadership buy-in from the top.

Sales Enablement That Works: Quality Over Volume

Katherine's most effective sales enablement tactic is creating clean, branded one-page cut sheets showing how two products work together—ideal for sales follow-ups when they're speaking to non-decision makers on calls. Beyond materials, she breaks enablement sessions into smaller, role-based groups rather than large organization-wide calls. Fifteen to twenty people allows for genuine engagement, real questions, and better information retention than broad training sessions. She also brings partners directly into enablement sessions to demo their products and answer questions firsthand, giving sales teams confidence and generating the specific customer objections they'll encounter in the field. Sitting on partner calls as a subject matter expert further strengthens sales team understanding and relationship building with partners.

Building Product Team Trust Through Visibility

Product teams often lack visibility into how their integration work impacts business outcomes. Katherine changed this by sharing transparency on partner performance metrics—how many customers are interested in a specific integration, how it's performing on the sales side, and what common struggles customers encounter. This information allows product teams to make smarter resource allocation decisions and understand the real impact of their work on the business. For engineers, seeing this connection between their technical work and business growth becomes motivating and contextual.

The Power of Cross-Functional Collaboration

Katherine emphasizes that balancing cool new technology with market-driven needs requires real collaboration. When she encounters interesting tools, she starts conversations with vendors and builds relationships strategically, putting them on hold until customer demand emerges. This prevents wasting resources on solutions customers don't actually need while keeping promising partnerships warm. She also stresses the importance of transparency about strengths and weaknesses—acknowledging where you need to learn, enrolling in courses, and finding mentors to fill knowledge gaps signals maturity and commitment to the role.

Leadership Buy-In as the Foundation

Perhaps Katherine's most important observation is that partnership program success depends entirely on leadership buy-in from the top. At LogicGate, sales leadership consistently reinforces that partners are a key revenue driver, creating organizational commitment. Without this messaging from upper leadership, tech partnership managers struggle to gain traction with sales teams. Katherine has witnessed the contrast with other organizations and colleagues where lack of leadership support made the role nearly impossible. She's grateful to LogicGate's culture, which gives partnership teams visibility and time to engage with sales during organizational events, reinforcing the importance of the work.

Connecting With Katherine

Katherine welcomes conversations with other partnership leaders and is particularly interested in connecting with young women engineers considering a transition into dynamic partnership roles. Her LinkedIn profile offers a fuller view of her background and philosophy.

Learn more about LogicGate here: https://www.logicgate.com/

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This podcast is hosted by Pandium, the only embedded integration platform that facilitates faster code-first development of integrations, allowing B2B SaaS companies to launch integrations at scale without sacrificing customization and control.

Learn more about Pandium here: https://www.pandium.com/

To access more resources and content on technology partnerships, integrations, and APIs, check out our blog and resources page below.

Blog: https://www.pandium.com/blog

Resources on Technology Partnerships, Integrations, and APIs: https://www.pandium.com/ebooks