The Integrations Team: A Pragmatic Approach to Collaboration

In the dynamic landscape of technology, efficient teamwork and collaboration are key to success.

The Integrations Team was founded 5 years ago at Docplanner. Since then, we kept polishing our ways of working with a mission of delivering high-quality experiences to 3rd parties. Most often by working on products built around the APIs.

This article provides an exploration of the Integrations Team, delving into their development methodologies and team dynamics, which leverage modern product discovery techniques, a very high level of autonomy, and a common-sense driven delivery framework.

Team Composition and Structure

The Integration Team is one of the teams in the Integrations Business Domain. Naming is tricky, but that was the very first team in the domain. Nowadays, the Integrations Business Domain is focusing not only on building APIs but also on creating various applications to integrate with 3rd parties. The business domain is led by the Product Lead and Engineering Manager.

The Integrations Team’s strength is drawn from its members, including a Product Manager, Team Leader, Product Analyst, 2 .NET Engineers, 3 PHP Engineers, a Fullstack Engineer, a Frontend Engineer, and a Product Designer. This assembly of expertise and diversity contributes to a cooperative atmosphere and cross-functional setup that enables us to deliver end-to-end working solutions.

Three Types of Products

The team is responsible for creating products across three primary categories.

We have developed an in-house API that enables 3rd parties to integrate with Docplanner. We also integrate the other way around, so we build our own products that integrate with the external APIs of other healthcare companies. Additionally, we build a few UI products that are being used by 3rd parties to reduce their effort on integrating with us with their custom implementations.

This brings different challenges to the team members. To give you a few examples:

• How to make the integration for 3rd parties easy, so they can have the freedom to implement what they need without our assistance?
• How to make sure that 3rd parties do not overuse our endpoints?
• How are we able to react to API errors faster than our customers can spot them?
• How to make APIs fast in all areas worldwide, including Europe and South America?
• How to properly manage authentication and authorization for different APIs?
• How to build a modern micro-frontend solution to be embedded in 3rd parties?

For sure we are not getting bored by doing the same thing over and over again.

Pragmatic Product Discovery

An important factor of our workflow is the approach to product discovery. It is about deciding what problems we want to solve and understanding them before jumping into the code.

We invest our time in comprehending user needs and market trends, enabling efficient idea generation and validation. By utilizing this insight, we mitigate the risk of misaligned products and optimize development initiatives, leading to building products that are useful for our customers.

In product discovery, we leverage the knowledge from books like Inspired and Empowered by Marty Cagan, as well as Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres. Discovery is not only a job of product managers. We are making it cross-functional by involving engineers and designers to this early stage. This way we build much better shared understanding among all the team members, and it leads to building higher quality solutions at the end.

Mission, Strategy, and Goal Setting

At Docplanner, all the product teams are given the mission. It is the statement that explains why the team exists. Behind the mission is the long-term strategy, which helps us understand how we want to reach our long-term goals.

For quarterly planning, we use an approach similar to Objectives and Key Results popularized by Google. We pay attention to goals, outcomes, and metrics, and try not to micromanage the outputs. If the team members want to join the quarterly planning sessions then they are more than welcome.

Development Methodology: Kanban and Shape-Up Hybrid

Once the OKRs are established, we proceed with the quarter’s execution.

A key aspect of being successful as a team is understanding that we are more than just a sum of its parts. Over the last few years, we’ve developed a smooth way of collaboration.

In contrast to conventional methodologies, we combine Kanban principles and learnings with the structure of Shape Up, which is a methodology described by Basecamp. This blend enables efficient prioritization, consistent development progress, and reduction of context switching. We follow the Kanban’s mantra of “stop starting, start finishing”.

The explanation of this workflow deserves a separate article, but in short we:

• work in cycles
• write pitches
• work on the projects
• empower team members to work on their terms
• try to reduce distractions
• focus on finishing before we start something new with the idea of limiting work-in-progress
• do dailies and short Slack huddles when necessary
• do retros to apply continuous improvement
• have cooldowns
• we also rotate the role of a Support Engineer to make sure that people working on the projects can fully focus on them.

Learnings from the well-known methodologies were adjusted to our needs. And this is what we believe in. It’s worth getting inspired by many different sources of knowledge, and then iterating on top of it to polish the way of working that will serve us. If we see that some technique doesn’t work for us anymore — we are not afraid of dropping it.

Balancing Professionalism, Fun, and Continuous Learning

Beyond the business goals, the Integrations Team acknowledges the importance of building a good atmosphere at work. We spend a lot of time here.

Informal activities like coffee meetings provide opportunities for relaxation, conversation, and relationship building. We also do Engineering Lean Coffees to create a space for interesting discussions about technology and implementation details. There is also a space for Lightning Talks, that our team members prepare. These are short presentations about topics related to engineering, design, and product management.

We love learning new things! And we believe by applying these knowledge-sharing rituals, we make our team a great place to work at.

Have the courage to find your own way

The world is full of many different workflow frameworks, techniques, and approaches for making team collaboration successful. The idea that we are trying to share in this article is that you need more than just a single technique to make the team successful.

It’s okay to get inspired by popular frameworks and techniques, but it is also okay to break the rules that each of these methodologies provide. At the end of the day, you and your colleagues are the people who do the work. All the methodologies are here to serve you. This is why it’s most important to keep learning and keep improving to find the way that you want to work. We have found our way. So you can.

Written by Rafal Makara