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How Do I Productize Integrations?

A productized integration is one that is built to be a core feature of your product (as opposed to a one-off integration for a particular customer). Building a productized integration usually involves market and user research, product design, development, testing, deployment, and continual monitoring and management.

Benefits of productizing integrations

Having productized integrations benefits your SaaS app in several ways including (but not limited to):

  • Prospective customers are more likely to select your app if you integrate with the other apps they use.
  • Integrations reduce the "time to value" that new customers see as they onboard with your app. They'll see the data from their other apps reflected in your app quickly.
  • Existing customers are more likely to be "sticky" resulting in less churn. Your app is more likely to become a core part of their workflow.
  • Integrations give you upsell opportunities. Depending on how you structure your commercial tiers, you can leverage integrations to increase contract size.

Steps to productize integrations

In order to productize integrations, you'll need to do a few things:

Do user and market research

Interview both current and prospective customers and identify what other apps and services they use. Figure out which systems it makes sense to build an integration for.

Build your integration

Build an integration between your app and the other apps you've identified.

Build an integration

Create a config experience

Create a pleasant configuration experience to make deployment easy. Configuring an integration should be easy for your end users, without need for your team's intervention.

Configure an instance of an integration

Create an integration marketplace

Add an integration marketplace to your app so customers can serve themselves.

Integration marketplace

Customer stories

Please see Customer Stories for interviews with Prismatic customers, who speak about how they implemented productized integrations and an integration marketplace in their applications.