We just made integration go-lives faster

Building a new integration is one thing. Switching it on used to be another.

At HighCohesion, those were two separate jobs handled by different teams. The person who designed and built a brand's integration couldn't take it live themselves - they passed it to a developer and waited.

On 9 July, we changed that. The team that builds a brand's integrations can now take them live themselves, in just a few clicks.

It's an improvement to our own internal work process, rather than a new feature brands log in and use. But as a result, we can now turn things around even faster for the brands we work with.

Every new integration needs some background infrastructure set up before it can run. That used to be a manual job only our developers could do, and it happened on a fixed schedule - a couple of times a week. So an integration finished on a Monday might wait a day or more before it could go live.

The result was a queue of work between two teams, and a hold-up between "built" and "live" that had nothing to do with the integration itself.

Now, the team who design and build a brand's integrations can set them up and switch them on themselves. No handover to a developer, no waiting for the next release window.

It also means we can safely trial changes in a live setting rather than a separate practice environment. So, now we can test how an integration will behave before it's handling a brand's real orders.

On its own, this isn't something a brand sees in their own account. What it changes is our pace. Less waiting between building an integration and going live with it means we can move faster - whether that's bringing a new brand on board, connecting a new system, or adjusting something already running.

This is also a step towards something bigger. Longer term, we want to give brands the same control we've just given ourselves: the ability to create, test, and go live with production-ready integrations directly. This update lays the groundwork.

We're always improving our own tools so we can move faster for the brands we work with. If you're weighing up your own integration setup and want to see how we approach it, get in touch.