Mindflash exposes API services to over a 1000 corporate customers and also integrates with several third-party services such as Zuora, Salesforce, KISSMetrics, Yammer to name a few.

In this talk, I will share details about best practices we adopted in implementing these API integrations with a lean startup like Mindflash, and also share some examples of how we manage changes related to services, and enable our systems to recover quickly and gracefully in case of failures.

I will also walk through our approach to deciding when to leverage an existing service versus implementing one and how to choose a third party service provider among many alternatives. I will be sharing specific examples from our experience including mistakes we made and learnt from.

This talk also includes a walkthrough of our shared support and data transparency model where all cross-functional team members have access to all information about system and third-party interface health, customer escalation pattern and all our analytical data to facilitate quick reaction when there is a component or interface failure.