Slack Integrations - the Pros and Cons of Building a Product on Top of a 3rd Party API

The explosion in publicly accessible APIs has fuelled a growth in services that we now rely on everyday and has been instrumental in making so many products even possible.

Almost all services depend on these APIs for parts of their functionality, but what if you decide to go all in on an API and build an entire product that is wholly dependent on it?

What are the risks and what are the potential rewards?

We have developed a number of small Slack integrations over the years, but a recent one, which started as a student placement project, has become so valuable to us over the last 6 months, that we wanted to make it more widely available for other teams. During this talk we’ll take you through the journey we have been on and the lessons we have learned along the way, in developing a product from an internal tool, scratching our own itch, to a scalable product in the Slack ecosystem.

We will explore the challenges we faced from 3 different perspectives: technical, product and commercial, and how we are applying Lean Startup methodology within an existing business to foster innovation at a rapid pace.