Proactive Engineering to Address Undocumented Features

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Being proactive in understanding and addressing undocumented features in APIs is crucial. By actively seeking information from prospect customers about their integrations with existing tools, engineers can preemptively identify potential pain points and engineer solutions around them. This approach helps in avoiding situations where customers discover limitations or features by hitting them through the application, allowing for a smoother integration process.

A common challenge for developers of SaaS products is integrating with existing services, including services that customers might already be using. For example, a SaaS product might need to integrate with customers using Salesforce, HubSpot, or another CRM system. However, this can be demanding for developers when 3rd party APIs are poorly documented or inconsistent.

Lauren Long is a co-founder at Ampersand which is a developer platform for SaaS integrations. She joins the show to talk about smoothing out API connectivity to make SaaS interoperable.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from information visualization to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is Head of Marketing and Developer Relations at Skyflow and host of the podcast Partially Redacted, a podcast about privacy and security engineering. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer.