📊 September 10 – October 12, 2026
Five weeks of shipped work.Adobe's asks became product, UAT and role videos.
After the 9 September demo, Sarah's team told us what they need. On 21 September Sumant Guha (Partner Engagement & Experience) asked for help getting unmanaged partners to register their first deal. DCN now does that end to end, alongside registration with AI-checked proof, a leadership view built around partner experience, and the Q4 continuity play. The partner experience update for Sarah went through Kyle and Colin and reached send-ready (v4) on 11 October. A full persona UAT program now runs inside the product: 95 scripted steps across six roles, a sandbox that resets itself, and in-app bug reports into Linear. This week we started automated role videos, recorded in the sandbox and narrated in Kevin's cloned voice; the first is live. Honest about breakage: a feature was hidden by mistake for ten days, the in-app AI was failing silently, and the sandbox reset had been rolling back since 9 October. All three are fixed.
Unmanaged Partner First Deal: Built
Leadership View + Regions Live
Persona UAT: 95 Scripted Steps
Sandbox Reset Fixed
Dropbox → Drive: 200,649 Files Verified
Role Videos: 1 of 6 Live
Adobe Page: Pre-Launch
Workstream 1
DCN: What Adobe Asked For, Built
21 September → 8 October: Sumant's ask becomes the build brief
On 21 September Kevin and Jon met Sumant Guha (Sr. Manager, Partner Engagement & Experience, in Sarah's org; he owns the martech and data layer behind the Partner Experience Hub). His objective: helping uncovered or unmanaged partners register their first deal. We adopted his vocabulary and turned his needs into the session 28 build brief.
N1 · Unmanaged partner first deal (P1)
A partner manager finds a partner in Adobe's directory with no manager, invites it to a first deal on a named account, and DCN creates a private link (DCN sends nothing itself). The partner sees what Adobe can already see about it, signs up, and registers with the same AI proof check as a managed partner.
N6 · Make the claims measurable (P1)
Every claim in the Sarah update has to be true in the product: partner advocacy pulse, dormant-partner flags, time to answer, registrations with proof.
N9 · The Q4 continuity play (P1)
In Q4 reps close commit and park upside; territories reshuffle at year end and Q1 is the trough. DCN flags upside and likely-to-slip deals so the brand brings a partner in before the reshuffle, and the partner carries the relationship across the AE change.
N2 · Next-best action (P2)
Rules-based, with reasons, per account and per user. Queued.
Vocabulary Locked
Adobe says unmanaged partners, not “fringe”. Kyle heard it as unregistered deals, which is a different thing. Still to confirm with Sumant: does “unmanaged” mean untiered, no partner manager, or never registered, and does “first deal” mean submitted, approved or won?
3–8 October: Registration as proof
Registration is where partners lose deals and Adobe loses trust. DCN now handles the whole path from evidence to number.
AI proof review of the original email
Partners upload the original .eml or .msg, not a screenshot. Forwarded emails are refused at upload; one-way, internal-only, wrong-account and after-submission emails are each flagged with the reason; the customer's own reply passes.
Pack in the brand's style
A registration pack in Adobe's layout with the partner as the headline and the proof attached.
Decision brief for the partner manager
What is being registered, how it got here, proof check, competition and money on one screen; “Ask for evidence” in a sentence; approve, and the registration number goes back to the partner with no email chain.
Complete our history (approved 3 Oct)
Ensemble has 2,743 “result unknown” rows across 1,011 accounts. The queue starts with the 269 accounts on Adobe's list. Sellers suggest results; they count only once the alliance manager approves (the anti-gaming rule).
9–10 October: Leadership view, regions and leader experience v2
Sarah is the first customer, so the brand leader page answers “what is it like to be our partner?”
L-1 to L-5 shipped
Regions and each partner manager's book; the brand leader page (this week's brief, five numbers against last quarter, partner experience, partner voice, by region, needs you); the partner leader mirror; Ask the program with grounded answers and a one-page PDF; next year's planning.
Partner experience band
A one-question pulse at the moment it's about (at most once a month, shown only at 5+ answers, never named), friction signals measured without asking, and an asks board where partners vote and the brand answers Planned, Done or Not now.
Leader experience v2
My team with momentum, practice checks and one-on-one talking points from each manager's own numbers. Reviews stay with HR: DCN gives an evidence-only period summary, no ratings.
Private → shared needs the partner's leader
The only leader approval in the product: a partner's customer moving from private to shared. Nothing reaches a brand until the partner's leader says yes.
1–7 October: Trust by design
Never-disclose is invisible to brands
A partner's confidential customers are excluded on the server, even from counts and totals. A Sharing page gives the alliance manager a keep-private list that catches lookalike names, a review, and a go-live gate.
PCE bridge rewritten
The original pull expected an export endpoint PCE never had, so nothing ever flowed. DCN now pulls public partner currency from PCE with explicit partner links.
10 design principles (1 Oct)
Currency not overlap; works without a CRM; route to the real person; trust by design; close the whole loop; a daily home for both sides; brand-neutral; AI as an exoskeleton; self-explaining screens; cold start solved. Every slice is judged against them.
Workstream 3
Adobe: Sarah Update, Client Page and Competition
7–11 October: The partner experience update for Sarah
Told as a story: the partner is the hero and “the blind spot” is the villain; one account followed through the loop, with Kevin's CX formula (experiences → attitudes → behaviours → results). The PDF is in the Sarah & Sumant reports above.
No pilot ask yet
Deliberately: earn more with her team first. The close asks what came out of Adobe's offsite.
Reviewed by Kyle and Colin
v4 send-ready on 11 October, with a “Live in the sandbox today” section and the Q4 continuity play. Ensemble figures are altered by a percentage until Ensemble approves the real ones.
12 October: adobe.hyvara-demo.com
A private page for Sarah's team: the story, a video per role, an interactive loop map that plays each step's moment, and role-play guides to try it in the sandbox. Behind named email sign-in (Cloudflare Access) once DNS completes.
9 October: Crossbeam teardown filed
Positioning, transcript, screenshots and a teardown in Drive (Competition › Crossbeam). Overlap is not relationship: Crossbeam sells the map, DCN closes the loop after the intro. Adobe-facing material carries no Crossbeam statistics.
Still Open
A short read-only live look at Crossbeam to answer seven questions, and a one-page battlecard, which the 9 September report already called overdue.
