Productizing a Marketing Ecosystem
Percolate is an enterprise software-as-a-service, enabling companies to efficiently manage the operational aspects of building and publishing content. An important priority of these customers is the ability for their technology solutions to interoperate. Integrations, however, are powered by a robust and supported developer platform. Even though Percolate had some APIs available for external use when I arrived, there were noticeable operational and product gaps which I sought to address.
In order to accomplish this, I knew that I needed the support of the entire organizations. To do this, one of the first things I impress the distinct needs of developers as a customer type. Next, I worked with the engineering team to build a release and communication process that would enable the engineering team to work quickly while ensuring a good customer experience for those using the company’s API products.
In terms of products, themselves, I focused on the highest requested use cases of customers: data synchronization and “if this then that” type behavior. For these, I focused the team on building out a set of webhooks, enabling customers to create triggers within Percolate and externally that enhanced the interoperability of the core product. No developer product is complete without good supporting documentation, so aside from engineering productized services and tooling, we spent a good deal of time auditing and improving documentation available to these customers.
For my time at the company, this work culminated in the announcement of a new developer platform to be released later in the year as well as the raise of a Series D for the company to focus on this strategy.
