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Irene Sibaja has spent years watching AWS partnerships stall at the same place. Everyone races to co-sell and skips the co-build and co-market steps that make co-selling work.
“Good partnership has a strategy around how you take what you’ve co-built into co-market and leverage that into co-sell,” she says. “When companies skip those steps, they end up disappointed, and then they trail off and stop actively engaging with AWS altogether.”
It also requires strong executive support because results are not always immediate. One of Skematic’s goals is to help ISV’s identify the small wins along the way and build the internal case for staying the course.
Irene has built partnership and customer success motions across retail, consulting, and tech, including three years as the AWS Alliance Lead at Treasure Data. Before that, she spent a decade at 7-Eleven, including three years in operations working directly with customers every day. Now she’s joined Skematic as Head of Customer Success and Product Delivery, and she’s bringing that customer focus with her.
Ask Irene where ISVs go wrong and she doesn’t hesitate.
“Everyone wants to co-sell, but the co-build and co-market steps are what drive the funding available through AWS,” she says. “A holistic build, market, sell strategy is what separates the partnerships that compound from the ones that stall.”
The other common failure: expecting AWS to deliver leads without doing the work to earn them.
“Companies get disappointed when AWS doesn’t just hand them opportunities,” she says. “That’s not how it works, and the ones who figure that out early are the ones who build something durable.” Skematic can help ISVs improve the way their opportunities are presented to AWS, increasing the likelihood of real AWS seller engagement.
And underneath both of those failures is often a third: a lack of leadership buy-in. Co-build, co-market, co-sell is a long game, and without executives who understand that results take time, even well-run partnership motions lose momentum before they have a chance to compound. Helping ISV leadership see the small wins along the way, and understand what those wins are building toward, is as important as the strategy itself.
Irene describes herself as a builder, and most successful in roles where she’s creating something from scratch. It’s part of what drew her to Skematic.
“AI has created new white space that didn’t exist before. I believe Skematic has captured a piece of that white space and solves a real problem,” she says. “Five years ago, we didn’t have the technology to do what Skematic does. Now we do. And leveraging customer feedback will only make our product stronger.”
Her customer-first mindset runs through everything. She traces it back to her years at 7-Eleven, where she was facing customers every single day.
“I’ve always been customer-first,” she says. “The question is always: what problem are we trying to solve, and how do we help them feel successful?”
At scale, that means knowing the difference between systemic problems and individual ones. Not every customer needs high-touch attention, but the patterns across customers tell you where to invest programmatically.
In her first six months, Irene is focused on making Skematic’s playbooks consistent and scalable, so that as ISVs onboard and adopt additional playbooks, the experience feels intuitive. And alongside that, she’s building toward something she believes is essential: real customer success stories.
Irene lives in Rogers, Arkansas. She’s the proud mom of two college-aged kids and a 15 year old schnoodle. In her spare time she cooks and gardens. She’s passionate about health and wellness, though she’s quick to note ice cream is always on the table.
She’s eager to bring her passion for customer success to Skematic to help ISVs get partnerships right.
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