Efficient Integration Roadmap Strategy

If you're considering integrating your product with third-party services – or are willing to grow your existing integration marketplace – this article can help you understand how to optimize your integration roadmap for the best efficiency of your product, engineering, support and marketing teams.

Principals

Building, promoting, and maintaining integrations is a challenging task for any B2B SaaS business.

Adding a new integration to your product requires effort from both your product and engineering teams during the research and development phase, as well as from the marketing and support teams during the launch and beyond.

However, there is a rational approach to integrating third-party services that can minimize effort and maximize your teams' impact throughout the delivery process.

First, you'll need to identify the tool's vertical that will enable you to reach the largest possible audience among your current or prospective customers.

Think about the tools that your customer uses daily as part of their work.

It could be:

• CRM → e.g Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive
• Help Desk → e.g Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk
• ATS → e.g Lever, Greenhouse, Workable
• …

Once you've found your main vertical and the tools you want to connect to, you should define and prioritize the different use cases / capabilities of your integrations.

Think about the context-switching actions your customer need to perform between their tools and yours

For the CRM vertical, it could be:

• Contact Creation → e.g When a new contact is created on your product, create a contact in the CRM
• Activity Logging → e.g Create an activity in the CRM contact page every time an action related to that contact is performed on your product

Once you've identified the tools and associated integration’s use cases for your first vertical, you can repeat the process for the next vertical you want to address. Repeat as needed.

This process will provide you with a clear understanding of the range of integrations available for your business.

Roadmap

Now that you are aware of the verticals and use cases to address, you need to construct a robust roadmap that will reduce go-to-market time and enhance delivery quality.

An effective way to deliver multiple integrations while reducing effort from all teams is to focus on:

1. One vertical
2. One use case
3. Then start building this integration’s use case for the top tools of this vertical

Once the integration with the top tools is complete, with only the first use case, you can begin gathering customer feedback to validate or re-prioritize the next use case within this vertical.

Note that you might not need to go to the same level of “depth” for every tools in the vertical; customers using some of those tools may be less demanding than others.

After you have demonstrated a strong positioning in your main vertical, you can start expanding by integrating your product into new tools' verticals.

Creating a successful integration roadmap requires a clear understanding of the goals and objectives of your organisation. By following these steps, you can ensure that your integration roadmap will be efficient and get the most out of your product, engineering, support and marketing teams.

Get in touch if you need help to:

• Identify the integrations you should build to meet your business goals
• Structure your Product, Tech, Support, and Marketing Teams around an effective release process
• Reduce the effort of building, launching, and maintaining multiple integrations