Building software products is hard. Building cross-product user experiences, where two otherwise separate software products combine to provide a joint solution, is really hard.

Yet, this is what’s required in the era of ecosystems.

You do need to build an exceptional software product to be successful. That’s always been a minimum requirement, but the minimum is no longer sufficient.

There’s massive potential for co-innovating with technology partners to jointly solve really hard problems for users. Doing this hasn’t always been “a given,” and now it’s one of your biggest opportunities for growth.

But, this opportunity does not come without challenges. This is an unfamiliar motion for most software teams. Even among those who have been successful with co-innovation, it’s rare to have scaled that success.

In this post, I want to talk about why and what can be done about it.

By Ryan Lunka.