Leader Spotlight: Making informed partnership and acquisition decisions, with Trey Courtney

Trey Courtney is Global SVP & Global Chief Product Officer at Mood Media, an experiential media company. He started his career at Accenture, managing technology and merchant projects. Trey then transitioned to Fern Templeton, a private investment and advisory services firm, before leading technical product management at Muzak. He joined Mood Media over 10 years ago as VP of New Product Development and has since worked upward to his current role.

In our conversation, Trey talks about his process for evaluating partnerships or acquisitions and how he successfully implements these initiatives, including addressing the people aspect before all else. He also shares insight into the difference in product management at a VC-backed firm versus a PE-backed one.

VC- vs. PE-backed firms

In the private equity environment, which is very focused on growth and operational efficiency, how do you maintain long-term product strategy while still delivering on short-term goals?

It’s always a fight — you have good quarters and you have bad quarters. For example, Mood Media is a service provider. We build software and have a core platform that we deliver our services on, but we have many large clients that ask us for unique features. With that, I don’t completely control my roadmap — some percentage of it is going to be consumed with custom client requests. However, that funds the roadmap if we’re smart about it.

With custom requests, we first make sure it will add value for other clients. Also, how are we ensuring that we share this with our sales and account management teams so other clients can know about it too?

It is a tug of war between the short-term goal of hitting revenue numbers this month and long-term plays. Especially for us in private equity, I don’t have the luxury of having five product managers who are all specialized — they tend to be generalists. That’s why I have them spend a lot of time on sales to understand the pipeline. What have they committed to in the annual operating plan (AOP)? What’s our plan to hit the year? What are their top priorities? We touch base every week or two to ensure we’re always in sync.

Are there differences in the product governance process in VC-backed firms, compared to PE-backed ones?

It depends on the type of business you are in. I can only speak from a B2B perspective, but VC-backed companies are focused on growth. They have the luxury of having a clean slate. What do we think we want to build? What’s our value prop? Then, they can build around that. Also, VC firms invest in development because they want to get to market faster. They typically invest heavily in an engineering team to develop products and services, and they expand it as they want to continue growing.

On the other hand, PE firms don’t invest in early-cycle companies. They’re in an established market with an established product, so they’re often trying to figure out how to optimize the product to either cut costs, make it more efficient, or go after more verticals. My experience with PE is that they always want to go fast to get their return. They’ll acquire before they build, most of the time.

Addressing the people side of an acquisition

You mentioned acquiring products. When you have a platform integration or you’re migrating customers over to a new platform post-acquisition, what are some of the challenges that you encounter?

The biggest challenge is typically with internal stakeholders. It depends on the product you’re buying, but if it’s complementary, you can usually meld the dev and product teams fairly well because they don’t see themselves as competing with each other. When you’re buying a company that does the same thing you do and has a lot of overlap, that’s when politics and cultural clashes tend to occur. There’s a feeling of, “We hated this other company, and now we’re on the same team as them.” There’s resentment around one product being “better” than another, etc.

A lot of times in an integration, people want to rush to figure out the technical specs. If you start there, you’re probably going to fail because the first thing you have to address is the people. Be able to clearly articulate what’s going to happen if you know it. And if you don’t know what’s going to happen in terms of the future of the product or team, be honest about that. Lay out the decision criteria and understand what it looks like.

As engineers and product people, we tend to be analytical. We look at things more black and white. It’s hard for us to wait for executives in a black box to make a decision. And the longer time goes by without a decision, the worse it gets. If you tackle the people aspect first and communicate, the technical piece will come together. It’s just human nature.

When you’re considering something like a partnership or an acquisition, what frameworks do you use to help with your decision-making?

I own partnership decisions, but I also work with my counterpart on the sales side of revenue. He does a lot of revenue partnerships, which blend a lot with my work. This is where PE is great — it forces clarity because, unlike a big company or VC-backed firm, you don’t have the luxury of a big budget. The expectations don’t change, though, so this forces discipline and thinking.

For example, we use a matrix for partnership and acquisition decisions. We rank the options based on whether or not they’re complementary to us, if they drive incremental revenue in a meaningful way, protect us from churn, etc. We have a sophisticated scoring mechanism where we can weight all the different attributes based on these items. We can always adjust it depending on what we’re considering, but it’s very helpful for a first pass.

How do you think about the speed for making a partnership or acquisition decision, especially when you’re trying to push for growth as fast as possible?

I’ve done partnerships for a long time, and one of the people I worked for used to say, “With

partnerships and sales, you want to get to the ‘no’ as fast as you want to get to the ‘yes.’” You can spend a lot of time talking to partners or potential partners about opportunities, but if they don’t go anywhere quickly, then it doesn’t matter.

In the outreach, the value prop should be articulated for both sides. Make sure you’ve got the decision makers in the room and try to get to a deal and a structure quickly that makes sense for all parties. From there, you can talk high-level about taking a product to market and integrating products and services. No one likes to say no, but it’s hard to get to the yes.

It’s really about priorities and value. If all those things check the box, then you start to hammer out the partnership and go to market with it.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in this process. I’ve gotten someone to the table, signed a term sheet or a partnership agreement, and then it never went anywhere because they wanted a partnership just for the sake of it. Ultimately, it’s like a relationship. Both parties have to be invested in it, and they have to continue to invest in it to get value out of it. Just like the dating process, you want to quickly figure out if you’re compatible or not, and you’re headed down the same path.

Integrating AI into products and workflows

In the last few years, there have been a lot of conversations about AI and how it’s going to affect workflows or roles. How is your team using AI and integrating it without causing anxieties?

Our business is unique. Our development team builds a platform, which includes engineering, QA, product managers, and others who are technically aligned. So, on the engineering side, we’ve been looking at a lot of AI tools. Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, etc., are all evolving very quickly. Our goal is to get our team to start using those tools for productivity.

My personal opinion is that we’re nowhere near being able to code something complex with AI by a push of a button. But if you’re a talented engineer, you’re going to get a lot more productivity from using AI. Specifically around legacy code and institutional knowledge, if you acquire a company and inherit their code base, you’re going to need to cut out irrelevant or poor code. This is where AI can change the game and help with these manual, frustrating processes. Going back to the integration pieces, AI can help evaluate how good it is from a technical level. It helps us do our due diligence.

I also manage a content team. Our business provides content media services to the retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries. The content team curates content, music, digital signage, interactive applications, and more, so we’re infusing AI with them. I’m never going to replace the expertise of someone who knows these areas well with AI, but if I can help them be more productive, it’ll open a lot of doors for us.

Also, from a product perspective, we just launched a feature based on client demand around how to use AI to create in-store messaging. It actually voices the message for you and creates the script. In the old days, a human would have to be good at script writing and voicing, but now the tool does it for you, so the client can scale faster. We made this based on actual conversations with clients who wanted to use AI for this type of work. As I see it, it’s important to talk to clients and understand what problem you’re solving before you just throw AI on top of something.

Since you have users excited about this type of product development, do you also see pushback from others who are hesitant to take an AI approach?

It depends on who you’re talking to. I find that when I’m talking to a client at the executive or senior level, they want the end result. They’re focused on output, so they don’t really have a preference for how that happens. If AI helps them get the result, they’re happy with that.

However, once you start talking to people who are directly using the tools, there’s a concern about whether they’re putting themselves out of work by using this technology. Some jobs are going to go away, and some jobs are going to evolve. It’s going to be painful for the next couple of years, but I believe the result is going to be positive. I don’t think humans are going to be replaced anytime soon.

Lastly, if you can summarize in a few bullets, how do you know if once you’ve shipped a product, it’s landing with your customers?

In B2B, the sales cycle is inherently different from B2C. A lot of people would say adoption would be the key metric, but in my world, that’s not the case. I typically look at the pipeline, meaning how many of my account managers and sales teams are talking about the product. The size of the opportunity for the product and services helps me figure out conversion likelihoods.

For example, if I have 50 account managers and 35 percent of them are talking about it with clients, I know what that could turn into. If I see that account managers aren’t having client conversations about it, we have a problem. Either they don’t understand it, or they’re fearful that it’s going to create issues with the client. That’s my first indicator. Is it in the pipeline? Are we talking about it?

From there, I look at adoption. Are people using it? Are people continuing to use it after? I’m guilty of signing up for something, playing around with it for a while, and then forgetting about it. Or, if it doesn’t scratch the itch well enough, I move on. That’s where adoption is so important, but it comes in after I see whether those initial client conversations are taking place and how those are going.