The most important thing about choosing a team name or title is ensuring it reflects your job both internally and externally.

What’s in a name?

At CauseLabs we have three core teams that make things happen: the Creative Team, the Tech Team and the Partner Solutions Team.

While the first two are fairly straightforward, Partner Solutions is not a title you hear everyday or find at every organization. Having an unfamiliar name or title can be detrimental. For companies and individual job titles, a unique name could be perceived as “fluffy” or “pompous” and elicit a wide and varying array of reactions.

Finding your own job title is a little tricky and I admit, we were timid about selecting a new team name, but we did not feel quite right about the old one. Thus, we renamed our team from Client Services to the new and improved moniker. While the words Partner Solutions are similar in meaning, the emotion behind our new title speaks volumes.

The most important thing about choosing a team name or title is ensuring it reflects your job and what you offer both internally and externally. Our team brainstormed for a couple days and discussed a multitude of options. The ideas ran the gamut from extremely amusing to everyday mundane.

Partner Solutions 101

In the end, we feel that the Partner Solutions title encompasses more of what we do and how we interact with our projects and partners. This new title is a message to our CauseLabs teams and to our partners, both current and prospective, that we are fully invested. We have partners, not just clients. We deliver solutions, not just services.

Our Partner Solutions Team does exactly what the new title says: We partner with organizations and our CauseLabs team members to find and build solutions. CauseLabs is an end-to-end technology partner and so these solutions come in many forms, including:

• strategic consulting,
• defining the MVP (minimum viable product),
• risk assessment,
• short- and long-term project planning,
• innovative thinking and problem-solving,
• project scoping,
• project team management,
• requirements definition,
• delivery management,

as well as:

• sharing a passion for the mission,
• working collaboratively a trusted partner,
• knowing and striving for the same goals,
• assisting with reports and donor grants,
• and serving as a guide for the discovery process.

Developing Your Partner Solutions Team

1. Focus on partnerships, not profits.
2. Offer solutions, not just products.
3. Build your team with mission-driven leaders.

Shift away from traditional product building models. Accept that in the industry of digital solutions it is not enough to be an assembly line of cookie-cutter parts; every project is unique. Focus is on your partner’s mission, strategic thinking around requirements, and team collaboration to innovate and deliver quality solutions.