How product managers can build and maintain integrations successfully

Product integrations, or integrations that are built between your product and your customers’ applications, are a critical way for SaaS companies to generate more revenue.

Case in point: Through our State of Product Integrations report, which involved surveying hundreds of PMs and engineers, we learned that product integrations help more than half of SaaS companies reduce churn, increase new business sales, and expand to new markets.

To reap these benefits over time, we’ll break down specific tactics to implement and maintain product integrations successfully. 

Adopt a scoring methodology to prioritize your integration requests

Your engineers likely can’t handle more than a handful of integration requests at a time, which means that you'll need to pick and choose the integrations that get prioritized.

To prioritize requests strategically and objectively, you can score them against several variables:

• The number of customers and/or prospects requesting an integration. In other words, the relative level of demand for an integration.

• The specific companies that request an integration. Generally speaking, the larger the accounts that request an integration are, the higher your score should be (as they’ll likely be willing and able to spend more on them).

• The level of difficulty in building an integration. You can suss out how long it’ll take your developers to build the integration by reviewing the API provider’s documentation, getting feedback from other developers in online forums, etc.

Note: There may be other factors worth considering as you review and compare integration requests. The guidance on this page is just meant to help you start building your own assessment methodology.

Once you know the answers to these questions for a given integration and can assign specific ranges for each criteria that correspond to certain values (e.g., 0, 1, 2), you can score each integration.

Related: How to choose between building and buying integrations

Work with your engineers to set up automated alerting workflows  

Product integrations will, inevitably, break. When they do, your engineers will need to pinpoint the issue quickly so that they can work on resolving it as soon as possible.

To that end, you can connect the monitoring tool your engineers use to collect logs of API requests and responses (e.g., Datadog) with the platforms these teams tend to check often already, such as Slack and Gmail.

Once you’ve built the integration, you can build an automation where once a specific alert is detected via an API log, key details from that alert get routed to a predefined email alias and/or channel in your messaging tool.

You can take this a step further by using a large language model (LLM)-powered agent as part of the workflow automation. More specifically, based on the information provided in the log, the agent can attempt to diagnose the issue and, based on its diagnosis, provide a potential solution. The agent can then include all of this information within the email or chat message, allowing engineering to resolve the issue faster.

Related: A guide to building a product integration strategy

Adopt a go-to-market strategy for every integration while building it

To ensure that each of your product integrations generates a meaningful ROI, you’ll need to take a thoughtful approach to raising awareness of them (both with customers and prospects), pricing them, enabling sales to talk about them, etc. 

And while it’s impossible to cover each of each of these areas in depth here, here are some high-level guidelines to keep in mind:

• Pricing: If an integration is critical in improving the customer experience, it’s likely in your best interest to offer it for “free”. The returns from clients that adopt the integration (in the form of higher retention) will likely make up for the costs of building and maintaining it. Otherwise, you can experiment with other pricing models, such as only including integrations in certain plans.

• Marketing: It’s worth announcing key integration launches on your social channels, highlighting integrations on your site through an integration marketplace, emailing clients and prospects about the integrations, and even including them in case studies when possible.

• Sales enablement: It’s not only critical to help reps understand which integrations are available and which are on the roadmap. You’ll also want them to understand the various use cases they enable, as that can help prospects better understand their value and whether they’re a fit for their business.

In addition, if you can provide demo accounts that show certain integrations in action and train the reps on using them, prospects can better visualize how certain integrations work and get excited about adopting them.

Leverage a unified API solution

Your product and engineering teams don’t have to manage integrations on their own. In fact, they shouldn’t, as integration development and maintenance likely isn’t one of your engineering team’s core competencies. It also distracts them from working on your product, which can have a significant long-term impact on your business.

While you have a few options for outsourcing integrations, your best option is a universal API solution (otherwise known as a unified API solution).

Using this type of solution, you can build to a single, aggregated API and then access hundreds of customer-facing integrations. This makes the process of scaling integrations significantly easier and faster.

In addition, with Merge, the leading universal API platform, you can access Integration Observability tooling to easily detect, diagnose, and resolve issues. And you’ll receive integration maintenance support on your engineers’ behalf.

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Product manager integrations FAQ

In case you have any more questions, we’ve addressed several more common ones below.

What does a product manager (PM) for integrations do?

Among other tasks, a product manager for integrations usually decides which integrations get prioritized, scope out the requirements for building each, and ensure that go-to-market teams are enabled to sell, support, and market each integration successfully.

What are some common interview questions for a PM for integrations role?

Here are a few to keep in mind and prepare for:

• What does your process of prioritizing product integrations look like?
• How do you measure the success of a product integration?
• How do you forecast the potential benefits of a product integration?
• Do you have experience working with 3rd-party integration tools, like a unified API or an embedded iPaaS solution?
• How do you decide which engineers should work on specific facets of an integration project?

How do you decide between building integrations in-house and outsourcing them to a 3rd-party?

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The decision depends on several factors, and you’ll need to review each carefully.

• How important is the integration to your business? If it’s core to using your product, it may not be worth outsourcing. The 3rd-party may not resolve issues as quickly as you’d like and/or enhance the integration as much as you and your customers/prospects want over time

• Do you have engineering capacity to not only build but also maintain the integration throughout its lifespan? Product integrations typically require hundreds of engineering hours every year, which may not be feasible for your business and/or desirable, as it prevents your engineers from building out and improving your core product

• How customized does the integration need to be? If it has to be highly customized, it may be difficult to outsource. That said, 3rd-party integration solutions—like Merge—now offer features to help you customize each integration  

Here’s a decision tree that can help you decide whether to outsource a given product integration:

How does adding product integrations differ from building other product features?

Unlike other product features, product integrations require working with a 3rd-party provider’s API. This introduces risk, as your team can’t fully control the 3rd-party API provider’s performance and improvements over time. 

Moreover, the timeline of building a product integration largely depends on the 3rd-party API provider. For instance, they may require you to enter into a formal partnership agreement to access their sandbox environment and documentation, which can take months.