Running a home warranty claims operation

At Thumbtack, I broke partnership development into five stages: discover, experiment, land, expand and grow. Here's what happens in each one, and what moves a partner from one stage to the next.

Every company your customer works with is a potential partner, and you can't pursue them all at once. Here's the framework I built at Thumbtack to decide which come first.

There's no master playbook for partnership development. Here is the framework we use to build Polygrade's partner ecosystem, and why it means a warranty company starts with the right partners already in place.

Everyone in warranty is being told to innovate. At Warranty Innovations, Jesse Wilson and I talked about the harder question: will your organization let you get it across the line?

The deepest lessons from decades of building were never about technology. They came from how organizations work, and from being wrong enough times to learn what does.

We started as a payments fix for warranty contractors. The bigger problem was the claim itself, going sideways long before anyone got paid. Here is why ProPay is now Polygrade.

Headed or headless is a day zero call that quietly sets your future cost of change. How to read the objective before the architecture hardens.

Build versus buy is really three options, not two: build it, replace your platform, or overlay intelligence on what you already run. A look at the real five-year cost of each.

AI is pushing the cost of building software toward zero. Judgment about what deserves to exist is now the scarce resource. Here is how we build at Polygrade.

A single model that handles intake, triage, and authorization ends up good at everything and excellent at nothing. Here is when a team of specialized agents wins, and when one model is still enough.

Why AI implementations stall on the way to production, and what to look for in a partner before you sign.