How to consistently ship integrations fast
Level up your integrations game
Introduction
Integrations, when done well, can be as powerful a revenue driver as your core product innovations. But many product and engineering teams struggle to consistently ship high quality integrations, fast.
How do you solve for this challenge? This post might have the answer.
Lean into continuous discovery
Start by creating a systematic process to capture integration requests and marry them with customers' jobs to be done. This means:
- Documenting potential integration needs mentioned during customer calls
- Training your sales team to note integration requirements during deal conversations
- Triage integrations based on implementation effort vs. value unlocked ($ blocked in deals, key customer requests)
- Identifying if the integration fits into an existing category, which can significantly reduce implementation time
The goal isn't to build everything customers ask for, but to identify patterns that reveal which integrations will deliver the most value.
Make integrations a part of the roadmap
Integrations often get deprioritized as "nice-to-haves." Combat this by:
- Allocating dedicated capacity for integration work in each sprint
- Setting specific integration goals tied to business outcomes (e.g., unlock $XX in blocked pipeline per quarter)
- Making integration progress visible in company-wide roadmap reviews
When integrations are treated with the same seriousness as core features, they stop being perpetually pushed to "next quarter." By adding 1-2 integrations in your roadmap each quarter, you can unlock additional pipeline, product use cases or key enterprise deals.
Learn more about roadmapping integrations in this post.
Design for engineering efficiency
The secret to shipping fast consistently is minimizing the time your engineering team spends on adding a new integrations:
- Create reusable components for common integration patterns:
- Categorize integrations that work similarly into groups with the same supported features
- Standardize the UI in your app to interact with different integrations
- Use consistent approaches for authentication, error handling, and data sync
By removing the repetitive groundwork, your engineers can focus on the unique aspects of each integration (e.g., data mappings, API-specific features) that deliver customer value.
Minimize maintenance overhead
The often-overlooked reality: maintenance burden can completely halt your integration velocity.
Here are some things you should plan for:
- Build a robust infrastructure that can handle scaling and an ever-expanding catalog of integrations and use cases
- Implement a comprehensive observability system (all the way down to user-level logging) to help with efficient debugging and support requests
- Think of edge cases and potential errors with robust error handling and clear, understandable error messages
- Consider how you will handle migrations as data schemas change over time
Conclusion
Consistently shipping integrations fast isn't necessarily about working harder—it's about working smarter.
By systematizing discovery, making integrations a roadmap priority, reducing engineering overhead, and designing for minimal maintenance, you can transform integrations from a soul sucking bottleneck into a powerful lever for product adoption and revenue growth.
Useful resources
How to think about integrations as a PM
