Partnership System Integration Tips

Recently we just had intense integrations with our business partners. We have a whitelabel product where registered whitelabel partners can use our core engine and put their brand as the label.

The development was very intense because there are some parts that need to be customized for each partners and some of the APIs are not even 100% finished yet. We do the development both ways, partners also allocated engineering resource on their side to help with the integration. During this intense moment, we made some mistakes, both engineering related and non engineering.

This post is about the lessons/key takeaways from the experience. I'll update the post regularly as the learning process continues, stay tuned!

# Unix timestamp for all datetime API parameters

As of now we're using iso datetime format for datetime fields, it's very likely that your API clients are using a different programming language / library and the tool that they choose is going to behave differently. At the end unixtimestamp is the most general way to pass datetime data.

# snake_case instead of camelCase for API fields

We had multiple integration problems when partners had typo. Let's face it, everyone has this experience where you mistype the camelCase format, e.g. someField -> somefield. Using snake_case should reduce the possibility of the problem thus would save your client's time and your time when doing integration.

# Use "sprint" as the development estimation time unit

There will be times where both parties agrees on to develop new features, depending on the urgency, if it's a not a critical feature then I'd advise to always use n sprint as the time estimation. The new non-critical feature takes 4 hours to complete? Set the estimation to 1 sprint, if it takes > 50% of sprint points then say it takes 2 sprints. Development is not just about code-complete, it's about delivering the features that meet the expectation with minimum bugs and 0 critical bug, probably you need to update your API docs too.

# Handling major changes/decisions

Make sure major changes/decisions will be discussed internally first, there will be different point of views, from product, UI/UX, engineering. Anything related to the major decisions should be answered with Let us discuss internally first, we'll get back to you by X day(s)

# Remember, it's a partnership

This is a partnership, it's a relationship where we will work together as a partner for mutual benefits, it's not a stage to throw mistakes, it's a stage to perform together and achieve great things together. Having this mindset will help your emotion and stress level in check.