The Build, Buy, Partner Decision is one of the most important frameworks a strategic product manager can leverage across their roadmap and innovation planning initiatives. They must fully understand and leverage to stay competitive but also drive their ownership of a market leadership position on behalf of their product or solution offering.
This framework allows the product manager a framework that outlines core considerations that assists in the alignment of their roadmap with a variety of partnership strategies and also serves to point out opportunities to also align these partnership strategies to the corporate innovation initiatives as well.
This framework fully lays out the key pro and cons considerations for each type of decision that a product manager must face at any point in the lifecycle of their product offering with respect to the considerations of any partnership strategy option.
The Challenge of Product Management: Product managers must consistently focus on sustaining competitive differentiation via a macro view of build, buy, and partner options. The product manager must address time-to-market, technology/product lifecycle innovation requirements, alignment to corporate strategy, and to fully address the costs/benefits of each decision option.
Build/Buy/Partner: Benefits and Tradeoffs: This slide succinctly outlines the decisions a product manager needs to keep in mind at any point of their product line build, buy, partner business case recommendations and financial analysis.
Partner Requirements to Ensure an Innovation Strategy Match: The partner selection process for a portfolio and its aspirations, is one of the most important requirements reviews.
Key References and Resources:
A NorCal PDMA presentation named “Build, Buy, or Partner.”Build, Buy, or Partner, How to Speed Your Time to Market, Deborah Henken, Highland Team, Norma Watenpaugh, Phoenix Consulting
Modern Business Strategy, Experience, and Design 