Salesforce, HubSpot and other integrations

Integrations for the first vertical I started leading teams with. It started with me working on Shopify and then Salesforce followed by HubSpot. Intergrations are a great way to understand the nuances of the SaaS product and having started my design journey in Chargebee with Integrations, I worked on an Onboarding plan for new designers with the same when we scaled from 7 to 25+ Designers in 2019-21.

Integrations are the moat for any SaaS business and we understand this by Sales and Resesearch conversations with Customers. Early resaerch that I led in 2018 revealed the workflows involing Salesforce and around this time, we have larger customers excepting tigher integration with CRMS catering to their Sales (Quote to Case workflows)

Outsourcing Development

This was also the one of the few successful implementation with an external development team.

How it started?

The intial integration was done by few developers who had quickly put together a mini Chargebee inside salesforce. It was time for us to understand the workflows and the use cases and design a system that scales not just for Salesforce but other CRMs that followed.

The Process

Workshop with the external development team in Noida helped them understand Chargebee and why Salesforce was important. A quick UX frictrions excercise with few usecases helped them understand the customer paintpoints.

Lightning Adoption

Salesforce was moving to Lightning and we had to make sure that the integration future ready. This was a good time to understand the lightning design system and how it can be used to build a scalable system. I started creating Wireframes with Lightning DS.

HubSpot

HubSpot started as integration in Chargebee and later the configuration had to be moved to embedded Chargebee application in HubSpot and the lessons from building Salesforce came in handy.