Show Notes
Jessica Alexander spent nearly nine years at CrowdStrike, architecting one of the most successful AWS partnerships in the software ecosystem - a relationship that has driven more than $2B in marketplace transactions. Jessica is now Founder and CEO of Skematic, where she’s encapsulating those learnings into an AI-powered platform designed to help ISVs navigate AWS programs, messaging, alignment, and execution far earlier and far more effectively than most can today. It is rare to hear this level of clarity about what truly makes an AWS partnership work. Jessica lived it. And now she is scaling it. Inside Partnering is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The Early Days at CrowdStrike - And Why Marketplace Was Hard When Jessica arrived in 2016, CrowdStrike was already a strong product - but its AWS motion was immature. They saw an opportunity to partner deeper with AWS, both to differentiate and to build a 360 relationship that included buy-from, sell-with, and sell-through motions. “We initially launched our marketplace listing and thought there’s gonna be a whole bunch of people who are gonna show up. And nobody showed up.” This is the moment almost every ISV experiences. Marketplace is not magic. It is a multi-year internal and external enablement effort. CrowdStrike learned that success required educating customers on how to take advantage of AWS EDP (Enterprise Discount Program) funds, influencing AWS sellers, and aligning internal teams that had never collaborated this way before. “It was a five year journey to develop that flywheel of how do we do private offers, how do we scale marketplace transactions.” That flywheel eventually became legendary - but only because the company invested deeply in internal alignment. Why Internal Alignment Is the Real Secret to AWS Success Jessica emphasized repeatedly that AWS partnership success is not just an alliance-led motion. It is organizational. “We think of partnerships as who we partner with externally, but the key to success is how you partner internally.” At CrowdStrike, she created a global specialist team that “spoke AWS,” navigated EDP ownership, trained the sales organization, and partnered closely with product, finance, and marketing. One of her biggest internal allies might surprise people: “One of my early allies internally was our finance team because they saw how fast marketplace transactions reduced our daily sales outstanding.” This internal partnership became one of the catalysts that helped CrowdStrike scale its marketplace motion faster than nearly anyone else in the industry. Why Skematic Exists After advising many startups, Jessica saw the same repeated pattern: ISVs want to partner with AWS. But they do not know: • When they are ready • What programs apply to them • How to build their messaging • Who internally needs alignment • What AWS expects • Or how to operationalize the entire motion So she built Skematic to solve this. “We’re hoping to simplify this with Skematic and help ISVs navigate the process a lot faster, a lot earlier, with fewer resources.” Skematic is an AI platform that generates partnership pathways, creates better together stories, aligns executive teams, and provides prescriptive, personalized recommendations based on where an ISV is in their AWS journey. It also includes coaching for the first three months to ensure companies set the right strategy and internal structure. “The goal is for the platform to be prescriptive and personalized - contextually aware of where the ISV is and how to market to their AWS customer.” And it is built entirely on AWS using Bedrock and Claude Sonnet. Scaling What Used to Require Full-Day Workshops Jessica compares Skematic directly to the workshops historically run by AWS partner leaders. “We want to make this programmatic and accessible to more people. Jen [Dawson] was one person. I’m one person. How do we scale this across th
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