Incorporating integration into your product strategy
The most effective product managers in today’s SaaS-driven environment are those who can design cross-product user experiences and facilitate the necessary integrations to make those experiences seamless.
Here are some strategies to include integration in your product strategy:
Defining Product Experiences as User Stories
Product managers are responsible for translating user problems into software requirements. With the rise of SaaS products, business users are now creating customized tech stacks rather than relying on massive platforms. This means product managers must address problems that go beyond their own products.
To create effective products, product managers should recognize the broader context in which users operate. Understand your role in the user’s overall workflow. Incorporating this understanding into your backlog helps prioritize and execute tasks effectively.
For example, imagine a CRM product manager writing a user story: “As a salesperson, I want to automatically create quotes in our accounting system to avoid manual data entry.” This story involves another product, emphasizing that your product doesn’t work in isolation.
Treat Integration as a Capability
Successful software products must interact with other software, making integration essential. There are two approaches: reacting to integration needs as they arise or proactively developing integration capabilities. The latter is more effective.
Developing integration capabilities involves understanding your approaches, both internal and external, and defining roles and responsibilities within your team. Determine who decides which integrations to build, prioritize them, and ensure they align with your product roadmap.
Integration is more than passing data to an API. Effective integration at scale requires building a robust capability early on, as addressing it later can be challenging.
Prioritize Integrations with Intention
Many product teams struggle to determine the value of potential integrations, often reacting to customer requests without a strategic plan. To avoid this, prioritize integrations based on their potential impact and difficulty.
Start by brainstorming all possible integrations, thinking about cross-product experiences that could benefit users. Categorize these integrations into four groups: imperative, important, adjacent, and agnostic.
Assess each integration’s impact using a basic ROI model and its difficulty considering factors like API documentation and potential barriers. Place them on a matrix of effort versus impact to help prioritize.
Having a pre-assessed list of integrations allows informed decisions when customer requests arise, avoiding rash commitments to one-off integrations.
The Worst Thing to Do is Nothing
These strategies can help product managers effectively integrate into their roadmaps. Ignoring integration can hinder product growth and user satisfaction. Proactively addressing integration leads to better outcomes and ensures success as a product manager. Effective integrations are critical to a product’s success and should be approached with careful planning and execution.