How to build a successful product integration strategy (4 tips)

An effective product integration strategy requires your team to identify the biggest integration opportunities over time and pursue them strategically and sustainably.

To help you do this, we’ve laid out several best practices worth following.

Align on your goal(s) for offering product integrations

Product integrations can serve a variety of needs. They can help increase customer retention; enable your reps to close more deals; support your ability to expand into new markets, and more.

Determining the goals that matter most to your business at a given point in time can help your team prioritize the integrations that get built first—and those that get built later.

For example, if your goal is to move upmarket and prospects at larger accounts are requesting integrations with NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, you might prioritize these integrations over accounting systems that other segments of prospects request. 

That said, it’s worth reviewing your goals on a predefined cadence (e.g., every 6 months) so that your goals and the integrations you’re planning on building short-term stay aligned over time.

Related: How product managers can implement integrations

Analyze integration requests on aggregate

You might have certain sales reps or prospects repeatedly say that they want specific integrations added to your product, while less vocal sales reps or prospects want other integrations added. This can bias your integration roadmap in favor of “the loudest people in the room”, while “the silent majority” are left without the integrations they want and need.

To prevent bias and allow everyone to weigh in, you can collect and review integration requests at scale. 

For instance, you can:

• Survey clients, prospects, reps, and customer success managers about the integrations they’re interested in. You can even ask them to stack rank the integrations to help you pinpoint the most lucrative opportunities

• Create reports in your CRM that allow you to see the opportunities that have been lost due to specific integrations not being available. In addition, you can create a report to see the customers that have requested certain integrations

• Track how often specific integrations get mentioned on sales calls, by whom, and when (a tool like Gong can help with this)

Adopting these approaches, either in combination or in isolation, can help you build a product integration roadmap that best fits the needs of your business.

Assess the integrations' ease of implementation via APIs

Aside from their business value, integrations can also differ significantly by their level of difficulty to build.

Some of the factors that can influence this include:

Quality of API documentation 

Some API providers offer comprehensive, up-to-date documentation that can answer any of your questions, whether that’s on rate limits, pagination, authentication, etc; while other providers can fail to update their documentation over time and/or don't cover key aspects of building to their endpoints. 

All else equal, the worse the API documentation quality is for a given provider, the lower that build should fall in your list of integration priorities.

Endpoint accessibility

In certain cases, an API provider might not provide the endpoints you need. Whenever that’s true, you’ll need to turn to alternative approaches to integration, such as using flat files or screen scraping. And since these other methods often come with significant drawbacks—from not syncing data in frequent intervals to failing frequently—the integration build may not be worth the effort.

All else equal, if an API provider doesn’t provide the endpoints you need, the build should fall lower in your list of integration priorities.

Implement the infrastructure and processes for maintaining the integrations

Once an integration is built, your engineers' workload will only grow. To help them maintain the integrations successfully, you’ll need to have systems and processes in place that can help your engineers pinpoint issues quickly and troubleshoot and resolve them with little delay.

With this in mind, you should determine how, exactly, you want to support your integrations. And once you’ve come up with your “game plan”, you should present it to key internal stakeholders in engineering and customer success so that everyone can be aligned and take the necessary steps to put it into action.

Here are some of the factors to consider when building out your integration maintenance and management strategy:

• Tooling: pick out and implement specific applications (e.g., Datadog) that can collect logs of your API requests and help your team detect issues

• Roles and responsibilities: defining the specific integration issues that certain engineers are responsible for can help foster areas of specialization and distribute the workload more evenly. Moreover, outlining the role customer success plays can allow for smoother handoffs and faster time-to-resolutions‍

• Workflows: think through internal workflows that can help your engineers become aware of issues sooner and work on resolving them faster. For instance, you can connect your monitoring application with Slack to send automated notifications in a specific channel whenever issues arise

Bring a best-in-class product integration strategy to life with Merge

Merge, the leading unified API solution, lets you add hundreds of integrations to your application through a single integration build. Merge also offers integration maintenance support and intuitive observability tooling so that your engineers don’t have to work on your integrations after the initial build and customer success can manage the integrations themselves.

Taken together, you can implement a better product integration strategy faster and more easily.

Learn more about using Merge to supercharge your product integration strategy by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.