Integration Platforms Explained: Simplifying SaaS Development

Tired of the complex and endless cycle of integrations and reintegrations? Are they standing in the way of a streamlined product development process and maximum efficiency?  

Well, integration platforms might just be what you need.

Integration platforms have stormed the software market, making integration expansion even more viable for SaaS organizations. They are powerful applications that enable native integration without the pressure of development and empower wider teams to contribute to product development.

Let’s assess the impact of integration platforms on product development cycles and how adopting one can help restructure your product development process and aid customer-centricity. 

The impact of integration platforms on product development cycles 

Integration platforms can drive product acceleration by relieving product teams of integration development. 

Software as a service (SaaS) product teams ensure the continued development of a product, constantly delivering features and releases that meet business goals and key stakeholder needs. These also include user-friendly updates that offer a competitive advantage. While juggling all of this, they face numerous challenges that can slow down a product's release. 

Usually, a product manager creates a product roadmap. It details the product build, when it shall start and be released, and how this feature or release will tackle key user problems, business needs, etc. However, a sudden customer integration request may derail this roadmap and take away key development resources, preventing the continued development of the core product. 

For example, when a customer asks for a specific feature or integration, the development team shifts its focus from planned tasks to address this request. This disrupts the overall strategy established by the product roadmap.

These unscheduled delays also make forecasting time estimates difficult and can disappoint the leadership team.

This is where leveraging an embedded integration platform can provide quick wins for delivering frequent customer-focused releases. 

Natively developed integrations can open up your SaaS product to existing customers as well as entice prospective customers to convert. You’ll provide users with the ability to integrate your SaaS product with hundreds, if not thousands, of other applications they may already use. 

Building in-house integrations means you can standardize and control the processes and data. They do take time and resources to build, but an integration platform can absorb this and allow anyone to design and build integration workflows for end-users. 

While roadmaps help plan out the details, rigid roadmaps can block development resources and hinder customer-centric approaches. Product teams need to strive for a delicate balance between innovation and customer satisfaction. 

Rebuilding the roadmap: being guided by customer centricity 

Inflexible roadmaps can obstruct a customer-centric strategy by limiting responsiveness to evolving needs. What a product team thinks is good for the platform may not be what the customer wants. Thus, teams need to listen and empathize with their customers and their needs. 

They need to get into the habit of communicating and interacting with customers regularly to gain deep user insight. These insights will inform a product team about pain points that aren’t being met. The team can also decide on how to incorporate addressing them as part of the product roadmap.  

They can go one step further and break down their customers into market segments to better understand how different markets use the product and if any pain points overlap. 

As a result, teams can plot an optimal and flexible product roadmap. Once a feature is released to tackle one pain point, the next release could double down on the same issue or tackle a different pain point in a different segment. This will help the team improve resource management while being customer centric. 

But why are companies and leadership teams focusing on building a customer-centric strategy? 

Why even become customer-centric?

In the current SaaS economic climate, organizations continue to face financial challenges. This results in tough decision-making and consolidation, such as streamlining tech stacks in response to cost and efficiency pressure. 

In such situations, customer centricity appears as an attractive tenant to SaaS organizations as it can create stability across their customer base by reducing churn. They can create a superior experience for existing customers. Further, they can build a solid foundation for future growth with extended customer lifetime value (CLV) through longer average customer lifetimes. 

The starting point of creating an improved customer experience is continuous communication with the customer and listening to their feedback. Customers want their needs and opinions to be reflected in their relationship with a SaaS, and the brand will gain valuable insights from those who actually use the product. Ultimately, it will earn improved loyalty and turn customers into product advocates.  

Hubert Palan, founder and CEO of Productboard, says customer centricity is “the ability to internalize the customer’s pain points and needs” and  “that ultimately saves you time and gives you the edge against the competition.”

Other benefits of customer centricity include boosted customer satisfaction and retention, improved product development based on customer feedback, and more upsell opportunities. 

How to build a customer-centric integration roadmap

Changing your product strategy to become more customer-centric may sound daunting, but there are some simple steps you can take to begin shifting your focus.

One prerequisite here would be to clearly understand what quantifiable and qualitative information you want to discover that will enable you to plot your next product steps. You could aim to find out what feature has the most impact on your customers, what they would like to see in the future, or what kinds of integrations would help squash potential issues they have with their systems, which could take their usage of your SaaS to the next level.

Let’s look at a few steps businesses can take to gain this understanding of their customers and build a customer-centric integration roadmap. 

Gathering feedback

When talking to your customers about future integration plans, you can approach them either actively or passively (or ideally both). However, both methods require the same planning to ensure consistency in data points and formatting, which will then allow you to track results over time.

An active way to gather customer feedback would be to interview your customers directly, ideally over a video call. This way, you can get a better feeling as to their sentiment about features and also enable them to show you directly what problems an integration could solve for them. 

This method also enhances your relationships with your customer base. The downside is that it is hard to scale, even if hundreds of users are willing to give up 20 or 30 minutes of their time.

A more passive approach would be to leverage tools such as in-app messages or email surveys. This allows you to ask a standard set of questions to a much wider audience. However, the hit rate and, at times, the quality are typically much lower.

A combination of the two should strike the right balance of quality and quantity for you to make informed decisions about what integrations your users really need.

Prospecting prospects

Using integrations as a potential way to win new clients could extend your reach further by considering the opinions of sales prospects.

You could include additional fields in your contact and “request a quote” forms to ask about integration requirements. You can also brief your sales team to inquire about them early in the sales process. This proactive approach helps identify the specific needs that the prospects might have. You can then use this information to tailor how your product integrates to align with their requirements and showcase its advantages.

Common requests for particular integrations are a pretty strong signal that they should be on your roadmap, as you could be losing prospects to your competitors by not having them.

Many SaaS companies also provide a marketing integration marketplace on their website, allowing prospects to discover what you already integrate with and what processes can be automated.  By including a “request an integration” form, you can directly monitor what prospects want and prioritize accordingly. 

Companies include integrations they don’t currently have as “coming soon.” While this isn’t the ideal solution, it tells prospects that those integrations are front of mind and shouldn’t be a deal breaker if it’s currently not live and available. 

These pages can also be strong indicators of interest. If particular “coming soon” integrations are gaining a lot of traffic, they should be prioritized.

Monitoring industry categories

If you see that a large proportion of your users are using integrations of a certain type, it is worth digging into that particular vertical market. 

If you already provide integrations to a couple of the leaders, or perhaps niches, within a market, it would indicate that providing integrations to a broader section of the vertical would widen your prospects. This would open new sales opportunities as you can cover common use cases with your application. 

This is where platforms like G2 become valuable tools. You can use them to learn more about individual vertical SaaS markets, gaining an understanding of their size and the leading applications within them.

Don’t integrations just add to development backlog?

Application programming interface (API) integration is the systematic process of connecting two or more software applications via their APIs. By connecting applications, data can securely, efficiently, and accurately be transferred between them. 

Most modern SaaS tools will have several native integrations for popular applications. These are responsible for the maintenance of the API without disrupting existing users. In addition to maintaining the APIs, these native integrations help build, develop, and publish new integrations, troubleshoot any errors, and respond to customer integration requests. 

So yes, integrations do add to the development backlog when they are built in-house, natively to the product. However, as Cyclr CEO Fraser Davidson often says, “A SaaS should build its technically critical integrations.” 

This means it is technically critical for the product's success that it integrates with x, y, and z applications. For instance, a SaaS company has developed a calendar application. It is technically critical for the product's success that it integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar. 

However, when integrations are commercially critical, a SaaS company could implement a third party, such as an integration platform. 

Take the previous example of a calendar application. It now needs to integrate with a CRM. This will add meeting details to a calendar invite when one has been booked. This is a commercially critical integration that utilizes an integration platform to extend and amplify it. This can quickly and easily be achieved through an embedded integration tool without adding to the development backlog. 

How integration platforms reduce development pressure 

Integration platforms reduce development pressure for several reasons. 

They enable businesses to deliver new integrations rapidly. This is because these platforms have many pre-built features like standardized APIs and low-code environments that enable non-developers to quickly and efficiently create integrations using drag-and-drop tools. 

Another reason is an integration platform's ability to absorb ongoing maintenance — especially the maintenance of APIs. APIs continually change as a result of rapid software development. Integration platforms have dedicated developers who build and maintain APIs, creating standardized connectors, so SaaS organizations don’t have to. As a result, there is reduced pressure on developers to continually update out-of-date APIs. Instead, they can focus on core product features and functionalities.  

An embedded integration platform as a service (embedded iPaaS) also provides SaaS companies with pre-built tools, such as integration marketplaces. This means end-users can visually shop available integrations and install them themselves. 

This embeddable integration marketplace offers advantages like smooth updates, compatibility verification, and centralized integration management, decreasing the workload for users and guaranteeing a uniform experience across diverse integrations. 

This user experience feature in a SaaS product ultimately boosts customer contentment by offering a convenient and adaptable method for integrating different applications, promoting a cohesive ecosystem within the platform.

Low-code integration building

Building and deploying integrations via low-code interfaces enables wider teams to become involved in the process. 

An example of this is customer success teams.

When a customer requests a new integration or even a customization for their particular use case via a helpdesk, it typically has to be passed up the chain for developer resources to execute. This leads to longer wait times, which could hamper a customer if the change is business critical.

However, embedded iPaaS tools provide the customer success team with access to user environments and permit them to integrate APIs using easy-to-use, drag-and-drop components. This simplified software empowers teams to directly design personalized apps or integration workflows that can be adjusted and expanded to suit the needs of the company or client. In short, integration development is no longer just a developer task.

Low-code integration building has shifted the traditional developer-centric way of delivering integrations into a SaaS to a self-service model. As a result, feature delivery times have improved significantly, and a standardized way to create and manage integrations has been introduced. This uniformity means there is easier migration between team changes, and company-wide standards are reinforced.

Unified APIs: a developer’s best friend

APIs knit the software world together, but naturally, they can be tricky to work with. 

Developers must first understand the type of API they are dealing with, whether it’s representational state transfer (REST), simple object access protocol (SOAP), graph query language (GraphQL), or Webhook. 

Next, finding the right API credentials and the varying authentication types can be difficult. Often, many APIs lack clear documentation, and as a result, development is slow. At the end of the day, developers are not domain experts on the APIs they work with. Therefore, end-user use cases may not be clear to them. 

A unified API, also called a universal API, helps mitigate these difficulties. It serves as a unified interface that consolidates and standardizes communication across various software components or systems. It acts as a shared entry point, enabling different applications to interact smoothly without requiring individualized integration for each system pairing.

By abstracting the intricacies of the underlying systems, the unified API provides developers with a consistent interface to streamline their work. For instance, they no longer need to concern themselves with authentication or parameters like rate limiting, as these are now automatically handled by the integration platform. 

This promotes interoperability, minimizes integration complexities, and boosts the system's overall flexibility. It also provides additional flexibility regarding what users want to do with the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).

Streamlined integration: accelerating product growth 

Pivoting your SaaS’s product direction to become more customer-centric has many benefits for both you and your customers. Providing your customers with integration and automation functionality within your platform helps them save time and money.

Approaching the integration discovery stage of your product roadmap as a collaborative effort with your customers and prospects gives you greater clarity in prioritization and enhances your relationship with your users. If they can see that they are having an effect on your product delivery, they will become more bought into your product.

Providing these integrations doesn’t require ripping up your roadmap and draining your development resources. By leveraging embedded integration platforms, you can scale and speed up your current integration creation, delivery, and management processes and remove a lot of pressure from your development team to deliver and maintain them. 

Implementing the right tool adds flexibility to your team, allowing you to be more dynamic and responsive to customer requests, giving you a big step towards becoming a customer-centric organization.

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Edited by Supanna Das