The missing third option
Most framings present a binary: build it ourselves, or buy an off-the-shelf product. Partnering — co-developing with a vendor, or engaging a specialist to build and then hand over — is a genuinely distinct third option that gets skipped because it doesn't fit neatly into either camp, even when it's often the best fit.
Explicitly including partner as a scored option, not an afterthought, surfaces cases where it's clearly superior to either pure build or pure buy.
Weight the factors that actually predict outcomes
A useful scoring framework weighs: how differentiating this capability is to your actual competitive position (build favoured if highly differentiating), how mature and stable the requirement is (buy favoured if well-understood and standard), and internal capacity to maintain what's built long after the initial project ends (often the single most underweighted factor in practice).
Scoring each option against the same weighted criteria, on the same scale, turns a political argument into a comparable, defensible decision — and makes it far easier to revisit later if circumstances change.
The maintenance question nobody weights enough
Build decisions are evaluated almost entirely on initial delivery cost and timeline, with long-term maintenance capacity treated as someone else's future problem. This is precisely backwards — the multi-year maintenance cost of a build decision usually dwarfs the initial delivery cost, and it's the factor most likely to be systematically underestimated.
Weighting this factor honestly, even when it's uncomfortable, is what separates a framework that merely looks rigorous from one that actually improves decisions.
The build decision you regret is rarely the one that cost too much to build. It is the one nobody budgeted to maintain.MNB Strategy Practice
Key actions
- Score partner as a genuine third option, not an afterthought
- Weight differentiation, requirement stability and maintenance capacity explicitly
- Weight long-term maintenance cost honestly, not just delivery cost
- Use the same scoring framework consistently across decisions