Partner Fleet reposted this
Learned something wild from a Senior Product Manager at a $2B SaaS co the other day. They had 8 product teams dedicated to building integrations. One PM per team plus 5-10 engineers. That’s 48-88 heads on recurring payroll. Likely 💰 $7-13M 💰 annual headcount cost. Their goal was to have full integration coverage to meet customer demand. Yielding major sales and retention benefits over their competitors 📈. But they ran into some issues: ➡️ Integrations take a long time to build, test, deploy, update ➡️ They weren’t getting them right - they aren’t SMEs on third party products ➡️ Hard to get customers to use them once built ➡️ They thought a few dozen integrations would do the trick, but turns out hundreds and eventually thousands are needed The overarching problem was the lack of scalability in their approach. More integrations = more heads on payroll. Eventually they said enough is enough, let’s open this thing up and crowdsource integrations. So they enhanced their API infrastructure, pieced together a developer portal and built a publishing mechanism for their app marketplace. It was a big bet. But the inbound demand was there… third party devs were ready/willing to build. Now, they’re delivering integrations at an exponential rate. They’re not limited by the capacity of their internal team. The idea of having thousands of integrations is no longer a pipe dream. It’s just a matter of time. At Partner Fleet, we believe the decision to “open up” should not be a big, expensive bet. Every SaaS company should have the opportunity to create an integration ecosystem without spending millions to build the infrastructure from scratch. Our mission is to make this strategy accessible to anyone who wants to pursue it.