Partnerships Channel

Turn partner interest into a bounded, attributable route to a customer outcome. Do not let a logo, introduction, meeting, proposal, sandbox activity, or verbal enthusiasm imply a partnership or commitment.

Workflow

1. Establish the desired customer outcome, target segment, motion, partner role, one decision owner, decision deadline, and whether the request is internal analysis, a draft, or an authorized external action. Keep a referral, co-sell, SI/implementation, reseller, OEM/white-label, distribution, or strategic-capital motion distinct; use more than one only when the roles and economics remain separately accountable.
2. Classify consequential evidence as observed, inferred, proposed, stale, or conflicting. Record source | source_date | maturity | confidence | permitted audience/surface; label missing information unknown. A planned capability, customer introduction, investor meeting, or signed-looking draft is not proof of commercial or delivery readiness.
3. Read [partner-fit.md](references/partner-fit.md) for motion selection, scorecard, negative-fit gates, diligence, conflicts, and decision ownership. Stop the affected recommendation when a negative gate or unresolved material conflict applies.
4. Before upgrading any relationship beyond a hypothesis, require one real customer or use case, named implementer and buyer, success criteria, timeline, delivery and support owner, and a plausible economic path. State which element is missing rather than creating a status label around it.
5. Read [pilot-economics.md](references/pilot-economics.md) to design a reversible pilot, define attribution and economics, and apply pilot-to-scale gates. Keep assumptions separate from observed results.
6. Read [enablement-governance.md](references/enablement-governance.md) when preparing enablement, deal registration, incentives, launch planning, permissions, or operating cadence.
7. Return the diagnosis, fit and open-gates register, recommendation and alternatives, a bounded pilot or operating artifact, required approvals, and one owner, deadline, success metric, and review date. Route customer acquisition to b2b-sales, delivery/health to customer-success, pricing or strategic choices to startup-strategy, and operating commitments to founder-operations.

Boundaries

• Do not announce, use a logo, make joint claims, disclose a customer, grant live access, or make a commercial commitment without supporting evidence and explicit authorization for that exact action. Planning or drafting approval is not authorization to execute.
• Default to least-privilege data and access. Do not request or retain customer, partner, financial, security, or personal identifiers unless necessary for the immediate authorized decision; keep reusable artifacts free of private identifiers.
• Do not silently resolve conflicts in attribution, incentives, account ownership, exclusivity, pricing, support, reputation, or compliance. Name the decision owner and hold the affected stage.
• For legal, privacy, competition, tax, sanctions, securities, regulated-industry, or jurisdiction-specific issues, use current primary guidance for the applicable jurisdiction, cite its review date and scope, and require qualified review before a consequential conclusion or commitment.