Fleetworthy, a private equity backed company, had acquired Drivewyze, a product that came with an already mature partner ecosystem, active, managed relationships with Samsara, Motive, Geotab, Transflo, and Verizon Connect Reveal. But those relationships lived at the working stakeholder level within each partner organization, not at the executive level. Separately, the rest of Fleetworthy's product suite had no partner ecosystem at all.
Building a new partner program and elevating those relationships to executive level was a mandate led by my VP of Partnerships, with the product rebrand under one Fleetworthy umbrella co-managed across teams. My own scope sat underneath that: proving what the partnerships already in motion were actually worth, inside a company that had structurally prioritized product-led growth over channel-led growth. Partnership deals convert slowly by nature, and slow doesn't read well next to fast product signals.
A slow-converting channel looks like a failing one next to fast product signals, even when it's working exactly as partnership deals actually work. I had to build the evidence that separated "slow" from "not working."
I personally drove the technical integration work, an SDK integration with Samsara embedding Bypass and Safety Alert capabilities natively, and an SSO integration with Motive unifying the login experience for joint customers. Both were built independently of the executive-relationship work happening in parallel above me.
To make partnership value visible on its own timeline, not just at final conversion, I built adoption dashboards tracking real usage of these integrations, and a Partner Intelligence agent that automatically turns a partner's public activity, blog posts, press releases, case studies, product announcements, into a structured, dated, categorized brief, grounded against the partner's actual published content rather than assumption, with a verification step that discards anything it can't confirm against a real source.
By the time I left, the Drivewyze partner ecosystem was generating $10.2M in ARR, growing 60% year over year. The Motive relationship's conversion from referral to full co-sell partner was in contract at that point. The portfolio-wide expansion into Fleetworthy's broader product suite was ongoing, still in motion when the role ended.