Auditing the Health & Mutual Success of Tech Partnerships
In this discussion, Ryder Ecommerce by Whiplash integration partner manager Caitlin Teed joins the Between Product and Partnerships podcast to walk through how she evaluates, grows, and measures technology partnerships, and what skills new partner managers should focus on as they move into this space.
Caitlin’s path into technology partnerships
Caitlin shares how a planned career in journalism shifted into roles at Apple and Shopify, where she first fell in love with partnerships and the “better together” story that comes from combining products to solve real customer problems.
She compares partnerships to building with Legos: there’s a shared vision of a final masterpiece, but both sides need to figure out how to get there together. At Ryder, she focuses on the technical side of that story, connecting warehouse and fulfillment operations with the right integrations to actually move inventory and deliver on what’s promised to customers.
The skills that translate best into tech partnerships
Caitlin highlights a few core traits and skills that set strong partner managers apart, especially for people moving from client services or customer success into technology partnerships:
- Deep curiosity. Partnerships is a young discipline, and sticking to “this is how we’ve always done it” doesn’t work. Curiosity about customer problems and about what’s technically possible is non‑negotiable. It drives better questions, better solutions, and better partner choices.
- Relationship building and trust. Over‑promising and under‑delivering on integrations can damage reputation quickly. Strong partner managers build trust with partners and customers by making sure what’s promised matches what’s actually possible in the product and tech stack.
- “Knowing just enough to be dangerous.” Caitlin positions herself as non‑technical but intentional about learning. She focuses on understanding core concepts like APIs well enough to ask good questions, speak confidently at a simple level, and know when to pull in developer advocates or technical experts.
- Comfort with feedback and continuous learning. Being willing to say the wrong thing, get corrected, and learn is part of the job. She leans on communities like the SaaS Ecosystem Alliance and leaders like Cristina Flaschen for ongoing learning.
- Patience. Coming from Apple retail and helping less technical customers, she learned that patience is essential. Technology and partnerships rarely move perfectly in a straight line, so patience and openness to feedback are key to long‑term relationship building.
Curiosity as a driver of better partnerships
Caitlin digs into what “being curious” actually looks like in practice:
- She starts at the customer level, asking what they’re really trying to solve versus just what they say they want.
- She then looks outward at available technology, researching new platforms or tools that might be better suited than what’s been used historically.
- This mix of problem dissection and market research helps ensure the team isn’t just checking boxes based on requests, but actually designing integrations that deliver meaningful outcomes.
How Caitlin approaches partner prospecting
Because she’s still building foundations in her role, Caitlin says prospecting is currently mostly reactive and customer‑driven:
- She collaborates closely with sales and customer success to understand recurring requests, pain points, and blockers.
- She surveys customers and joins sales calls or consultative calls to hear needs directly.
- She then looks at gaps in their existing partner and integration directory and uses that to prioritize who to talk to.
She shares a concrete example around EDI (electronic data interchange). Many customers needed better EDI providers to work with retailers like Nordstrom or Macy’s. That repeated customer demand sparked a new EDI partnership and integration, which has already generated meaningful business for the partner and delivered real value to Ryder’s customers.
How she selects and evaluates partners: the health score
To decide where to invest, Caitlin and her team use a partner health score template, essentially a weighted report card for both new and existing partners.
Key elements in the health score include:
- Account mapping and overlap. How many mutual customers and prospects exist? What does the shared ICP look like? Is there a clear joint value proposition?
- Relationship quality. Responsiveness, bi‑directional engagement, and willingness to reciprocate on initiatives like content, events, or enablement.
- Sales and customer success enablement. Whether the partner supports enablement through lunch‑and‑learns, training, or helping the team confidently recommend their solution.
- Content and marketing collaboration. Availability of mutual one‑pagers, case studies, co‑marketing opportunities, events, or webinars that make it easy for sales to tell the joint story.
- Technical and integration readiness. Presence of an open API, developer docs, and access to dev support or partner engineering resources.
- Operational basics. Legal contracts, revenue share agreements, and other onboarding elements, which matter but are weighted less than relationships and enablement.
- Position in the market. Even if a partner is hard to access or slower to engage, a strong market position can still make them strategically attractive.
Weights matter. Relationship health is the single heaviest‑weighted category at roughly 20% of the total score, with open API and technical readiness also carrying significant weight. Caitlin emphasizes that relationship health doesn’t mean being best friends; it’s about consistency, responsiveness, transparency, and follow‑through.
Health scores roll up to three partner status bands:
- Strong: roughly 75–100
- Stable: roughly 60–75
- Developing: below ~50, which is common for new or early‑stage partners unless they’re already very strong in the market.
The goal is to revisit these scores at least twice a year, ideally quarterly, to reflect how much can change in the ecosystem and in each partnership.
Micro‑enablement and keeping partners top of mind
On sales and CS enablement, Caitlin focuses heavily on micro content and lightweight internal tactics that keep partners visible and easy to recommend, such as:
- Short internal one‑liners (for example, a quick story on how Loop Returns helped turn 40% of returns into exchanges for a shared customer).
- Internal Slack channel updates, quick videos, and fun “trading card” style snippets that show how pairing a customer with a particular partner creates a “bonus round” of value.
- Joining sales calls to recommend relevant integrations.
- Pulling data from systems like Salesforce on how often partners come up in deals, to shape where to invest more time.
All of this is designed to make it simple and natural for sales and CS to introduce partners in the right moments.
Caitlin’s five core KPIs as a partner manager
Caitlin tracks a focused set of KPIs to measure the impact of her work and align expectations with partners:
- Leads sent to partners
Volume and quality of customer or prospect referrals Ryder sends out to partners. - Net‑new customers and sourced revenue from partners
Deals where a partner brought in a new lead, plus the value in pipeline and closed‑won revenue tied to that intro. - Influenced revenue
Deals where a partner didn’t source the lead, but played an important role. For example, learning during a sales cycle that a prospect is a heavy user of a partner like Loop, then reinforcing the strength of their integration to reduce perceived risk and move the deal forward. - Expansion revenue
Revenue impact from introducing partners to existing customers. An example is referring Loop to a current customer and then tracking the uplift in exchanges versus returns, and connecting that improvement to revenue outcomes and retention. - Partner health score
The health score itself becomes a KPI, reflecting both the commercial and strategic strength of each relationship over time.
Caitlin also uses a mutual success plan template for each partner, outlining foundations, launch milestones, public go‑to‑market, and growth efforts such as adoption or lead sharing. This creates shared accountability and clarity between both teams.
Priorities going into 2023: foundations and marketplaces
Looking ahead, Caitlin’s top priority is foundations. She compares it to spin class: before coming out of the saddle, you need a solid base or the ride will be bumpy.
Her focus areas include:
- Building and tightening processes and frameworks: health scores, mutual success plans, repeatable onboarding, and integration rollout playbooks.
- Launching an integration marketplace to make it easier for customers to discover and adopt integrations.
- Creating more reusable content, clearer enablement paths, and better internal alignment so that future integrations can be launched and scaled more efficiently.
Throughout, she stresses that process should serve outcomes, not exist for its own sake. The goal is a solid runway that enables more and better partnerships, not rigid bureaucracy.
Caitlin closes by inviting people to connect with her on LinkedIn or in the SaaS Ecosystem Alliance Slack, especially those who are navigating similar challenges in building technology partnerships and ecosystems.
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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
