AWS Competency

Perfecting the ‘Validate’ Step in the AWS Partner Flywheel through Compentencies

Discover how AWS Competencies provide tangible proof of your expertise, fueling a cycle of trust, credibility, and growth.

Paul Duvall

25 Feb 2025 • 6 min read

Building credibility as an AWS Partner goes beyond listing capabilities on your website. It requires a demonstrated history of solving real-world challenges, a cohesive approach to best practices, and a commitment to continuous validation. This Validate step—part of the AWS Partner Flywheel—is critical in showcasing your ability to deliver proven solutions.

Over the years, I've seen firsthand how rigorous AWS Competency programs—from DevOps and Financial Services to Security—act as a litmus test for how you're able to truly deliver results as an AWS Partner. Achieving these competencies illustrates that you've validated your technical depth and customer success in a manner AWS can stand behind. It's one thing to claim you can architect secure environments or automate deployment (CI/CD) pipelines; it's another to have AWS validate that capability through formal Competency recognition.

Why Continuous Validation Matters in the Flywheel

Each AWS Competency—whether it's Security, DevOps, Financial Services, or another domain—comes with a detailed checklist to confirm you've met specific criteria. From having the right level of AWS Certified engineers to publishing customer case studies, it ensures you're not just dabbling but deeply committed to delivering consistent, repeatable results.

This notion of continuous validation is exactly what the Validate step in the AWS Partner Flywheel promotes. In the Flywheel model, Validate isn't just about completing a checklist; it's about establishing a cycle of improvement. By regularly verifying your capabilities, you build a strong foundation that propels you forward in other stages of the Flywheel—such as Build, Market, and Sell.

When we went through the AWS Security Competency several years ago, for instance, a typical self-assessment checkpoint might have looked like this:

Holding the right APN Services Partner tier (e.g., Advanced or Premier).
Employing a specified number of AWS Certified Security – Specialty engineers.
Creating multiple customer case studies (some of which must be publicly referenceable).
Maintaining a comprehensive landing page on your website, highlighting your offerings.
Demonstrating active thought leadership (e.g., blog posts, whitepapers, open source, videos, podcasts, and conference talks).

Regardless of which AWS Competency you're pursuing, these elements systematically validate your experience in front of both customers and AWS itself. Over time, they reinforce that cycle: the more you validate, the more trust you build—and the more demand you generate for your services.

Certifications and Training: Cornerstones of Validation

Certifications are a key part of the Validate stage. They serve as an internal motivator and an external credibility booster. Encouraging every team member—even in non-technical roles—to learn cloud fundamentals promotes a shared language throughout your business.

For specialized Competencies, certifications go deeper. For example:

When multiple team members hold relevant specialty certifications, customers see tangible proof that you're qualified to solve their unique challenges. This naturally shortens sales cycles, sets the tone for more in-depth discussions, and opens doors to advanced projects.

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In 2018, we set an ambitious goal: ensure that 100% of our team—including our Business Operations staff—earned at least one AWS Certification. By year's end, every person in the company had achieved this milestone, collectively earning over 100 AWS Certifications—half of which were at the Professional level. This deep, company-wide AWS expertise strengthened our ability to deliver highly specialized DevOps and automation solutions for our customers.

Publishing Your Approach: Partner Practice Landing Pages

AWS calls out the need for well-defined partner practice landing pages—something that factors into your Competency self-assessment. These landing pages are part of validating your proficiency in a given domain and ensuring customers can quickly gauge your capabilities. Effective pages typically include:

Clear Offerings: Summaries of what you provide for a specific Competency (e.g., deployment pipelines, security automation).
Relevant Case Studies: Links to customer success stories, showcasing real-world outcomes.
Calls-to-Action: Easy ways for prospective customers to engage your team.

By making these pages cohesive and logical, you demonstrate that your Competency is integrated into your practice rather than merely a badge. It's yet another way of confirming—validating—that you have repeatable patterns and mechanisms in place.

Thought Leadership as a Validation Tool

Another critical requirement for AWS Competencies is public thought leadership. AWS wants to see blog posts, videos, webinars, or conference talks that showcase how you're advancing the state of the art. This requirement fits neatly into the Validate step of the AWS Partner Flywheel: publishing your learnings proves you aren't just implementing solutions but actively refining them.

When Stelligent ramped up content covering everything from Infrastructure as Code security to DevOps re:Invent re:Caps, prospective customers often arrived already familiar with our expertise. This meant conversations quickly shifted from “What can you do?” to “How can we apply your approach to our own environment?” Providing meaningful, educational content—like our open-sourced onboarding program, Stelligent U, or podcast episodes on DevSecOps—validated our depth of knowledge and lowered barriers to adoption.

Demonstrating Solution Selling

A genuine hallmark of AWS Competency validation appears in your interactions with customers—especially your sales approach. Often, you need to prove how you identify new opportunities, train your sellers, and articulate the business value of your specific solutions. This involves walking a customer through a structured, multi-phase roadmap, for example:

Initial Assessment – Evaluating the current environment for gaps, risks, or inefficiencies.
Foundational Development – Implementing baseline best practices (e.g., IAM, encryption, CI/CD automation).
Building the Platform – Adding advanced capabilities like automated compliance checks, threat detection, or financial forecasting.
Ongoing Operational Excellence – Embedding continuous improvements so that each solution evolves with your customer's needs.

By providing this roadmap, you reinforce to AWS (and your customers) that your solutions are not only technically sound but also tailored for real-world business growth. This approach aligns with the Flywheel's guiding principle of Customer Obsession, ensuring that everything you do supports concrete outcomes.

Self-Assessments and Final Submission

Your final step in achieving or renewing any AWS Competency (and thus completing a crucial phase in the Validate step) is the self-assessment. Here, you gather all supporting materials—landing pages, certifications, case studies, blog posts—and check them against AWS's requirements. Far from a mere paperwork exercise, this self-review can:

Uncover hidden gaps in your processes.
Reveal opportunities for additional training or documentation.
Confirm that your team remains aligned with evolving AWS best practices.

You'll want to gather feedback from several others before submitting it to the auditor for a decision. Incorporating their feedback almost always strengthens your submission and your practice. The entire exercise exemplifies what the AWS Partner Flywheel's Validate stage is all about: continuously refining, documenting, and proving your readiness to deliver results.

Making Competencies a Core Pillar of Validation

Going through the AWS Competency process—whether Security, DevOps, Financial Services, or another specialization—underscores why these certifications must be integral to your approach rather than added on as an afterthought. Each requirement—from certified staff and referenceable case studies to partner practice landing pages and official self-assessment—pushes you toward the Validate mindset: proving your expertise, refining your processes, and earning third-party credibility through AWS.

This perpetual cycle of learning and validation—what the AWS Partner Flywheel aims to strengthen—builds a lasting reputation with both customers and AWS. It's more than just a badge; it's a continuous process of verifying and showcasing that you can deliver at scale. Once you successfully Validate, you can then leverage that success in the other Flywheel stages, driving an ever-increasing momentum for your AWS-based business.

References & Further Reading

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A Final Note: Although this post focuses on the AWS Partner program, most of the strategies discussed can be readily adapted to other strategic partner programs.