Carmen is a PM at a startup. She has an idea for a feature, but it requires a dataset that her company doesn’t have. To solve her problem, she searches Google and finds a case study about using an external API. carmen shows the case study to Raj, her engineering partner. Raj says the API looks good! It is from a reputable vendor and looks to be well supported.

Raj wants to ask his team to look at the API and run some tests. He goes to get help from Xuan, and they use the case study Carmen found to locate relevant Docs.

They set up a test app to try out the integration. Once they feel confident with the results, they go back to Carmen.

Raj and Xuan tell Carmen that the integration looks good and that it will do most of the things that they hoped for.

They let Carmen know how much it will cost and how long it will take to build a full integration.

Next, Carmen and Raj go to house security and product counsel to see what their concerns might be.

This conversation is not as easy -security and legal have read the docs from Carmen’s case study and they seem to have a long list of things that can go wrong.

The whole team goes to Susan, the CEO of the company.

They show her a report and give their recommendations so that she can make an informed decision.

Susan listens to everyone’s hopes and concerns. She wants to be sure she can give a clear “yes“ or “no“ answer.

After listening to everyone, Susan encourages Carmen and Raj to go ahead with the integration.

Susan says that the risks are manageable. She is in touch with leaders at the company from Carmen’s case study and feels confident that the success can be repeated.

Carmen, Raj, and their team build out their test integration into a fully functional prototype, using dummy data provided from the API vendor.

Now that everything is working, they can submit their application to the API vendor to access live data.

After a time, the API vendor responds they are satisfied with the application that Carmen and Raj sent in. The vendor grants an API key, and the integration is live! Carmen’s feature idea is a reality.