“You Don't Protect a Brand by Slowing Down Good Partners” impact.com's Max Ciccotosto on Killing the Industry's Favourite Sacred Cow

Ask Max Ciccotosto what the industry treats as essential but is actually doing harm, and he doesn't hesitate: up-front manual approvals. As Chief Product Officer at impact.com, Ciccotosto has watched brands cling to manual partner review queues out of fear, of fraud, of compliance risk, of brand misalignment, while the delay itself quietly costs them their best partners, who simply go sign with a competitor that says yes faster.

That instinct to name what's broken instead of what's trending runs through how Ciccotosto thinks about product more broadly. Having built products at Microsoft and founded startups of his own, including Mediarails before its acquisition by impact.com, he argues that most growth platforms still mistake more dashboards and more controls for more value, when what actually compounds is clarity: insight, direction, and confidence that an action has worked for someone else first. In this conversation, he explains how impact.com serves a creator who needs three taps and a global publisher who lives inside an API without fragmenting the platform underneath either of them, why he calls partnerships a two-sided marketplace that most enterprise software still designs around only one side of, and why he'd replace manual gatekeeping with real-time automated risk monitoring across the board.

Max, you’ve built and scaled products across social commerce, growth platforms, and now partnership ecosystems. What’s fundamentally misunderstood about how users experience “growth” products today?

The biggest misunderstanding is that growth is a feature. It's not. It's fundamentally about the overall system designed to drive key outcomes and how each part of the system compounds.

For example, when we started Mediarails, most customers focused on acquiring new partners for an affiliate or creator program, but very few focus on optimizing onboarding or reactivating dormant partners. 

Today, many platforms still assume that more data, more dashboards, and more controls automatically create value. When you think in terms of growth systems you want to focus more on clarity of insights, the ability to provide direction on where to act next, and a bit of confidence that it has worked for others. 

As AI becomes more embedded in software, I think we'll see a shift from products that simply report performance to products that actively guide and accelerate growth decisions. That's the direction we're focused on at impact.com. 

Partnership management sounds simple on the surface, but quickly becomes messy across affiliates, influencers, and B2B relationships.  Where do users feel the most friction in existing tools?

The biggest source of friction is fragmentation that results in silos.

Many organizations have different teams managing different partnership types, each using separate systems, each with its own workflows, reporting models, and measurement frameworks. Affiliates sit in one platform, creators in another, referral programs somewhere else, and B2B partnerships often rely on spreadsheets and manual processes.

The result is tremendous operational overhead, limited visibility into what's actually driving value. This often leads to suboptimal capital deployment (both in terms of spend and time allocation) and, most importantly, reduces the ability of teams to scale.

Users spend enormous time recruiting partners, managing contracts, tracking performance, processing payments, and reconciling channel-level attribution. Much of that work is still surprisingly manual. We have been focusing on the opportunity for us to become the operating system for partnerships - bringing data and workflows together with the visibility across the teams that need it.

impact.com brings multiple partnership types into a single platform. From a product standpoint, how do you avoid creating a “one-size-fits-all” experience that works for none?

You avoid a "one-size-fits-all" trap by strictly decoupling your underlying platform capabilities from the end-user workflows. The classic B2B enterprise product mistake is trying to force every persona through the same surface area just because they use the same backend capabilities.

Instead, you build a robust, agnostic data model underneath - as we did for our tracking, attribution, and payment rails - and then specialize the UI layer on top for each persona. A good example for us was introducing different program templates for creator programs vs retail media programs vs traditional affiliate.

Another example is how our creator on a mobile device needs speed and immediacy: grab a link, check earnings, and approve a campaign brief in three taps. They shouldn't be forced to navigate complex governance or raw data tables. A large global publisher, on the other hand, lives in a desktop-first world and in most cases might use our APIs to automate processes.

Both users rely on the exact same engine, but their daily product environments look completely different. Building a composable architecture lets you hyper-optimize the experience for distinct user motivations without fragmenting your core tech stack. You accept the engineering overhead of maintaining tailored frontends so your users don't have to accept a degraded experience. It’s a bit like the cost of a delightful experience, a tradeoff that we would make any day.

What are the hardest trade-offs when designing for both scale  (enterprise complexity) and usability (day-to-day operator workflows)?

Having built products at Microsoft, where scale is everything, and founded startups where over-leaning on enterprise design led to costly mistakes, I’ve learned that the hardest trade-off is managing the constant tension between user-centric restraint and enterprise sales demands.

Enterprise RFPs and deal cycles naturally favor "knob farms": endless toggles, granular controls, and edge-case configurations. Sales wants to check every box to close a big deal today. But true usability requires radical restraint; if you expose every knob on the main screens, you end up with a bloated experience that paralyzes the daily users.

The CPO’s job is to navigate this commercial tension. Feature checklists win the initial contract, but user adoption and ease of use drive long-term expansion and net retention.

We solve this through smart architecture and progressive disclosure: we build deep, configurable power for the enterprise, but we tuck the "knob farm" away into admin layers, governance defaults, or APIs. The daily operator gets a clean, intentional workspace, while the enterprise buyer gets the governance and control they purchased. Scale means giving enterprises the leverage they need behind the scenes; usability means protecting the end user from having to stare at the machinery.

You oversee product, data science, ops, and growth. How do you ensure these functions don’t pull the product in different directions, especially when optimizing for outcomes like revenue, efficiency, and user experience?

Alignment starts with a shared definition of success.

We spend a lot of time identifying the handful of metrics that truly demonstrate the value we create for our customers. When teams share ownership of those outcomes, conversations shift from competing priorities to solving the same problem from different perspectives.

Our job is to deeply understand the obstacles preventing customers from growing their partnership programs and then leverage product, AI, data science, and operational expertise to remove those barriers. 

As the ecosystem expands to creators, publishers, and non-traditional partners, how are you rethinking product design to accommodate very different user motivations and behaviors?

One of the biggest shifts we have made is recognizing that not every participant in an ecosystem is operating the same way as a business.

A creator, publisher, affiliate, technology partner, or brand ambassador may all contribute value, but they're motivated by different goals and operate differently.

Historically, many platforms were designed primarily around the brand's needs. Partnerships are a two-sided marketplace, and if the partner experience is bad, the brand’s program will fail, no matter how powerful the brand’s enterprise software is. We invest 10x to ensure we have the right experience for the right persona in our partnership ecosystem.

This means we continue to make different decisions for each of the different personas: from how we treat onboarding for creators in the US (now an incredibly frictionless experience that is converting at 4x what it was last year) to how we provide advanced multinetwork reporting with our Trackonomics offering for more “pro” affiliate publishers.

The most successful ecosystems reduce friction for everyone involved, not just the program manager.

Slightly left field—if you had to remove one feature or concept that the industry currently treats as essential, because it’s doing more harm than good, what would it be and why?

If I could eliminate one sacred cow in this industry, it’s up-front manual approvals. It’s just friction. When a creator or publisher decides to work with a brand, their intent and commercial momentum are at an all-time high. Forcing them to sit in an approval queue for days destroys that velocity, drives up drop-off rates, and pushes top partners straight to competitors who make it frictionless to get started.

Brands cling to manual reviews out of fear for what seem like good reasons: fraud, FTC compliance, and brand alignment, but doing manual inspections of every partner application one-by-one is an obsolete security model that doesn't scale. The shift we need to make is moving from reactive gatekeeping at the front door to instant onboarding paired with real-time AI governance. You give partners immediate access to grab links and start generating revenue, while continuous background models monitor active traffic, content compliance, and payout risks in real time (or near-real time).

Ultimately, you don't protect a brand by slowing down good partners; you protect it by building intelligent software that manages risk dynamically behind the scenes. By replacing manual gatekeeping with automated circuit breakers, we unlock massive network speed for creators while delivering far better, scalable security for the brand.