Partner-Led Technology Innovation
Buy proven capabilities, integrate them, and reserve builds for true advantage
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 93%
Start with customer friction and the experience the business needs to improve, then make a deliberate build-versus-partner decision. Build internally only where proprietary engineering creates meaningful advantage; otherwise, let specialist technology companies develop and refine the capability. Leadership stays active in the market, watches what vendors are creating, and pulls proven technology into the company's ecosystem. This reduces the burden of funding every experiment while preserving room for an internal engineering team to create selected proprietary components. The mechanism is continuous: listen, identify a gap, evaluate whether ownership matters, find a capable partner, integrate the solution, and keep improving as technology changes.
Origin
Kevin Peranio said PRMG decided not to develop all of its own technology. The company maintains an engineering team for selected proprietary work while using outside partners for broader capabilities.
Core principles
- 01Technology must keep progressing with customer needs
- 02Not every useful capability should be built internally
- 03Proprietary development belongs where it creates a real advantage
- 04External specialists can absorb development risk and speed up learning
How to run it
- 1
Listen for friction
Collect recurring customer and team complaints, then identify where time, effort, or confusion is blocking the experience.
Pro tip Stay close to customers and industry events so the signal is current.
- 2
Define the capability
Translate the friction into a specific capability or experience improvement rather than starting with a vendor or fashionable technology.
Watch out Do not treat an industry buzzword as the customer requirement.
- 3
Choose build or partner
Ask whether owning the underlying technology creates enough strategic advantage to justify the cost and perpetual development burden.
Pro tip Reserve internal engineering for the parts that genuinely need to be proprietary.
Watch out Technology that is not continually improved can become obsolete quickly.
- 4
Hunt for proven partners
Look for specialist companies already developing the needed capability and assess their team, product, and ability to work with your organization.
Pro tip Use real implementation experience, not market claims alone, to judge a partner.
- 5
Integrate into the ecosystem
Bring the selected technology into the existing platform and make the resulting workflow coherent for customers and staff.
Watch out A capable product can still create friction if the integration is fragmented.
- 6
Advance continuously
Keep listening and improving rather than treating the integration as a one-time transformation.
Pro tip Benchmark the experience as customer expectations and adjacent technologies evolve.
In the wild
PRMG kept an internal engineering team and proprietary components but chose not to become a company that developed every technology itself. It adopted specialist products, including a new product and pricing engine, and worked with vendors on portals and employment verification while continuing to improve its lending platform.
→ The company could modernize its customer experience without committing tens of millions of dollars to building every capability internally.
Common mistakes
Building everything internally
The company absorbs the cost, risk, and permanent maintenance burden even when a specialist partner already has the capability.
Buying before defining the friction
Starting with a vendor can produce an impressive integration that does not solve the customer's actual problem.
Treating technology as finished
A platform that is not continually advanced will fall behind changing products and customer expectations.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for established operators that need to modernize quickly without becoming full-scale technology companies.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when the technology itself is the company's core differentiator and must remain fully proprietary.
From the transcript
“we don't want to develop our own Tech”
“we do stuff in house we have an engineering team and we do create things that are proprietary”
“allow other companies to take shots and develop certain things and then we pull that Tech into our ecosystem”
From the episode
Innovating In the Mortgage Industry with Kevin Peranio