Building a Business Case for Integrations
Contributor to the Alloy and Partnership Leaders guide for GTM teams: the What / Why / How framework product managers need before an integration request gets a yes.
Alloy and Partnership Leaders wrote this guide for partnership and sales teams who keep losing integration requests at the product desk. I contributed the product manager’s side of it: what a PM actually needs to hear before an integration can be prioritized.
The framework is three questions. What system do you want to integrate with? Why is it being asked for: a customer, a partner, a new workflow, a co-marketing promise? How will the end user expect it to work, and how does it improve what we already offer? They sound obvious. They are also the three things that are usually missing from a request, and the three things that determine both the priority and the technical fit. The guide also uses my split between practical triggers (a specific deal or renewal depends on it) and strategic ones (a new market or a new kind of workflow), because the two need different evidence.
The piece came out of the same work as the integration questionnaire: making the partner side and the product side agree on what is being built before anyone scopes it.
The product manager page. What system, why now, and how the end user expects it to work.
Triggers: separating practical asks (a customer needs it to close) from strategic ones (a new market, a new workflow).