Partnership and M&A Tech Strategy
One of the key activities CTO will help the business is supporting and advising on M&A and partnership activity, particularly in due diligence of the technology stack and employee acquisitions. Following few principles can be helpful among other things.
Build awareness of upcoming companies, valuations and products that could compete with your products/business in short and long term.
Build awareness of business investments your immediate competitors are making in people and products. Work closely with competitive intelligence teams to be apprised on regular basis.
Awareness of technology assets(including great teams and people) that might be available at any given time, that helps you to make an informed build vs buy decisions.
Making sure your leadership team can be ready to support activities around partnerships and M&A.
Have an on-going conversation with board and exec team to help continuously refine the strategy
From the product and technology point of view
Create common understanding of current state of product, technology gaps among all stakeholders along with technology vision, that helps make an informed partnership and M&A choices
Create common framework to carry out high level and detailed M&A activities(culture, product, technology etc). A Framework for initial Due Diligence, Pre-M&A detailed due diligence to help make decisions and for conducting Post M&A integration to make the M&A successful. Needless to say any of these activities have to align with Product and Tech vision and strategy
Encourage teams to provide detailed tech first unbiased logical opinions. Each product team should have similar awareness around their competition and who is disrupting their space.
Develop framework for carrying out Post M&A activities. Some integration are pretty simple vs some can turn out very complicated due to technology and people especially.
As always define key metrics for each of these activities and continually measure and improve.
These basic principles can be applied while building partnerships(product and tech) as well with few modifications to the framework.With these basic principles, you can always have informed conversations with Board and Exec teams in every stage of these activities to influence the outcomes.
For more info on strategies one can adopt, contact us at