ยท 7 min read
Integrations are a contract, not a connector
Connecting two systems is the easy part. Agreeing on what a field means across both of them is the work.
Two teams can both have a field called status and mean entirely different things by it. Sales means the stage of a deal. Support means whether a customer replied. Wire them together without a conversation and you get confident, well-formatted nonsense.
Write the mapping down
A durable integration starts with a short document: which system owns each field, what each value means, and what happens when they disagree. It takes an afternoon and saves the quarter.
The connector is a detail. The shared definition is the thing that keeps working after the person who built it changes teams.