Looking back: April 2026
There’s a specific partnership in my past that I think about more than most. It’s the partnership that made me a believer in kill criteria — the written, specific, measurable conditions under which a partnership gets formally reassessed and potentially wound down.
Before this partnership, I would have told you kill criteria were a good idea. After it, I made them a non-negotiable condition of entering any new partnership. The shift in practice was the difference.
The Partnership
The details don’t matter in specifics — the partnership was with a complementary company in an adjacent market, announced with some fanfare, and intended to produce joint revenue through co-selling and integrated offerings.
The opening months were what every partnership launch is. Press release. Joint customer kickoff. Executive enthusiasm on both sides. A shared vision for the quarter that would demonstrate the partnership’s value.
The problems started quietly. Initial joint deals took longer than expected. The integration work between our products required more engineering than either side had scoped. The go-to-market motion required more enablement than the partner’s sales team absorbed. Each individual friction was small. In aggregate, they added up to a partnership that was consuming real resources and producing only modest returns.
The Slow Drift
Over the following 18 months, the partnership went through the classic lifecycle of partnership decay:
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The initial ops cadence was weekly. It dropped to biweekly within four months. Monthly within eight. Quarterly within twelve. By month 15, we hadn’t had a formal review in over two months.
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The executive sponsor on their side rotated into a new role in month six. The replacement didn’t have the same investment. They were polite but clearly had other priorities.
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The dedicated partnership operator on our side moved to a different role in month ten. We didn’t backfill specifically — the responsibility got absorbed by a senior BD person who had four other priorities.
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Joint pipeline stopped growing. Joint revenue flatlined. Neither of us formally raised the concern because neither of us wanted to be the one to call the partnership into question.
By month 18, the partnership existed on paper and in a shared Slack channel that had gone mostly silent. We’d both spent significant resources. The revenue return was negative when we factored in the real costs.
Why It Persisted
Here’s the lesson I took from watching this happen — to myself, to the partner, to multiple partnerships I observed from the outside in subsequent years:
Partnerships persist past their usefulness because nobody has the authority or the political space to end them without specific triggers.
Our executives liked their executives. Nobody wanted to be the one who called the partnership dead. The formal termination would require a conversation that would be awkward, and with nothing forcing it, the path of least resistance was to let the partnership quietly continue doing nothing.
Kill criteria would have forced the conversation. With specific written triggers — “if joint revenue is below $X by month Y, we review” — the partnership would have been formally assessed at the right time. Whatever the outcome of that assessment, it would have been a clearer, faster, less politically loaded process than the slow drift we actually experienced.
What I Wrote Into the Next Partnership
When I set up my next significant partnership — same general category, different partner, different structure — I insisted on explicit kill criteria written into the partnership agreement. Specifically:
- At 90 days: named operators in place, weekly ops cadence running, minimum number of joint prospects in pipeline.
- At 180 days: specific revenue threshold for joint-won deals. If below, formal review by both executive sponsors.
- At 365 days: minimum ROI threshold for continued investment. Below that, formal reassessment — either restructure, scope reduction, or wind-down.
The partner pushed back initially. “It feels like we’re planning for failure.” I explained my reasoning — not planning for failure, planning for clarity. Both sides of a partnership deserve to know what success looks like and when the relationship should be reassessed. Without those markers, partnerships drift past their usefulness.
They agreed. We wrote the criteria into the agreement. And when we hit the 180-day mark, we sat down with the data and had an honest conversation. The partnership was performing — but below target. We adjusted scope, revised the cadence, and committed to a 90-day rework period. At 270 days we reassessed.
We restructured. The second phase of the partnership was meaningfully more productive than the first — not because the underlying potential was different, but because the kill criteria had forced the conversations that made us redesign the motion.
The Principle
Kill criteria are not about ending partnerships. They’re about creating forcing functions that convert partnerships from drift mode to decision mode. Every partnership I’ve seen run well has had them. Every one I’ve seen drift into zombie status has lacked them.
The same principle applies to other domains — strategic initiatives, product investments, hiring experiments, organizational structures. Anything that could drift past its useful life benefits from written decision triggers.
What I Tell Anyone Starting a Partnership Now
Write the kill criteria before the press release. If the other side won’t agree to them, think carefully about whether you actually have a partner or a vanity alliance. Real partners are willing to commit to the conditions under which the partnership gets formally reassessed, because real partners understand that a clear, structured reassessment is in both parties’ interest.
The partnerships that work are the ones that both sides take seriously enough to hold each other accountable. Kill criteria are the mechanism for accountability. Without them, accountability drifts.
The partnership that taught me this was an expensive education in what drift costs. The restructured version of the next partnership — the one where we’d learned from the prior experience — was a meaningfully better relationship.
I’d rather have had the lesson earlier. Now that I have it, I pass it on every time I’m involved in structuring a partnership.
The cost of writing kill criteria is an awkward conversation at the start. The cost of not writing them is an awkward 18 months later.
Choose the earlier conversation. Every time.