Building a Web Visitors Add-On: A Few Things That Helped Us & Could Help You
Web Visitors is a Pipedrive’s lead generation add-on powered by Leadfeeder.
The add-on helps the user to reveal those organizations that are interested in their product, let them know where they’re coming from, what they were looking for and much more. Having this valuable data in one place creates more qualified leads, aka more future happy customers.
As I was part of a few different teams that worked on the add-on for around a year, I’d like to share a few things I believe helped us.
The Team
It was, from the very beginning, a collaboration between two companies on many different levels, but “the team” was always present (even if not physically). We had and continue to have people (on both sides) that are truly passionate about this project and about creating good software. This, I think that was a crucial part of such an integration’s success.
Without these people and the vision that they had, it’s hard to imagine the outcome would have been successful.
Communication
Communication may be one of the hardest parts of every project, especially if that team is distributed across multiple companies and locations. Luckily, it was covered pretty well via a few methods:
- Shared Slack channel where anyone can ask any question with no hesitation. No matter how “simple” or “stupid“ the question was, someone will always reply (regardless of their position).
- Weekly/bi-weekly meetings were a great way to share the progress, making a small demo, discussing questions, and seeing people in real-time.
- Only involving people who should be involved. That’s what I saw on this project and believe it’s a good practice. There is no point in inviting a bunch of people to discuss something that only a few were aware of.
Open API
To speed things a bit and to not have to wait for each other, it was agreed to use Open API 3 as a way to describe the future REST API.
Instead of waiting until the real thing was delivered, the API was automatically mocked-up through provided specification and resulted in:
- work being split between teams and finishing in parallel.
- enabled space for functional tests right away
- created the necessary documentation.
Although auto mocking worked well for most cases, sometimes we still needed to test edge cases which required some manual work. Plus, we also needed to make sure that the real API works in the same way as a mocked one.
Even if we take these constraints into account, I think it all worked out well for us.
Gradual Improvements
- What are the customer’s needs?
- What should the pricing be?
- What makes the product great?
These questions and many more “the team” still needed to looking and find the answers to.
The Web Visitors add-on was released as a closed Beta that we improved over time. Research, user interviews, prototyping, and adding things piece by piece, helped in transitioning to version 1 (which is only the beginning).
Safe Environment
Last but not least, is ensuring a safe development environment.
Due to the closed Beta, the focus was on getting users’ feedback and improving the product, hence the dev environment being postponed for a while (but never forgotten).
For smooth collaboration between two teams, from different organizations — a safe place to test things is a must.
Conclusion
The feeling you get when someone starts to use something that you were working on together with a lot of great people, is simply amazing. It was a great experience and ended up being quite educational.
I can’t wait to see how the Web Visitors add-on will evolve and connect more people together as time carries on.
Interested in working in Pipedrive?
We’re currently hiring for several different positions in several different countries/cities.
Take a look and see if something suits you
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— iOS Developer
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