In a self-service buying motion, uptime is crucial and an exceptional user experience is key. While billing or CRM tools are often the underlying source of truth, relying on those applications can quickly become limiting in the experience a business can offer to their users. And every maintenance window becomes a big threat to your revenue.
Today’s guest has been through just that. Ben Grohbiel is a Senior Software Engineer at Snyk, a cybersecurity company that helps developers create best-in-class security depth for their applications. Ben and his team are currently building a set of APIs to support Snyk’s self-service buying motion and provide uptime and stability for their customers.
In this episode, we sat down with Ben to talk about the infrastructure they build and what he has learned so far that can help other engineering teams providing a smooth and seamless self-service experience to their users.
Here are some of our favorite takeaways from the conversation:
- Business needs are changing all the time. Thinking of monetization as a platform instead of separate systems allows your team to quickly respond to those needs and create fluid and seamless experiences. As your business grows, an infrastructure that supports this becomes inevitable.
- To provide uptime and stability, we need asynchronous communication between the Billing API and our GTM systems (salesforce etc.).
- Building a monetization platform, there are many stakeholders involved. Sync, sync, sync! Besides weekly catch ups about deliverables, we also reach out to the teams to understand needs and provide full access to what we build via open API specs.
- Embrace iterations! Your business evolves, so does its needs.
- Be aware of different mindsets in the company and help shake the understanding that user experience is, in fact, very important.
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If you enjoyed this discussion, check out how Reclaim.ai built their own infrastructure. And if you’re thinking about building your own infrastructure, but don’t have resources for a months-long project, check out Stigg’s APIs and SDKs.
