I need your product to work inside my system

If your product collects data related to one part of my work, I want to combine it with other sources in my own system. I want to use your thing in my thing, so make it easy for me to integrate the value your product delivers.

At Blaxel, I was a marketing team of 1, and paid acquisition was one of the many things I owned. I built a review system that brought together Google Ads delivery data, product activity from PostHog and payment outcomes from Stripe. I wanted to understand what it cost to bring people in and what happened after they reached the product.

A conversion in an ad platform isn't the same as a signup, a created workspace or a payment. Putting them together doesn't prove an ad led to a payment. I can look at them together while keeping clear about what each number means and where it comes from.

A keyword spending money without conversions needed a different response from a campaign that was converting but limited by its budget. I could consider excluding search terms that didn't fit the product. I wanted the data together so I could see what needed attention and where I still didn't know enough to act.

I built agent workflows to review the conversion data and prepare suggested changes. That moved paid media review from monthly to daily. Campaign changes still needed my approval. If there wasn't enough data to make a call, I left it unresolved.

Each product gave me part of what I needed. I chose what to combine, when to review it and what needed approval. Together with what I knew about the business, that data could help me answer questions I couldn't answer from one source.

An export can be enough for something I do once. If I run the process every day, I need a reliable way to get fresh data.

I might call an API from my own software, connect my AI tools through MCP, or use a command-line interface (CLI) from a terminal or script. If your product can take an action I need, I want my system to be able to request it within the permissions I've set.

I need to know what the data means, what period it covers and whether anything's missing. If something fails, tell me what happened so I can fix it.

I may still use your interface to set things up, look into a problem or do specialised work. I want access to the data and functions I need without having to rebuild my process around your product.

When I'm helping a product grow, I want to know how it fits into the customer's work. They may be getting value from it without opening our interface.

We still need to bring in customers at a cost that makes sense, help them get value and give them a reason to keep paying. Looking at what happens inside our interface only tells us part of that.

For a customer running a weekly review, I'd want to know whether our data gets there each week. They could go a month without opening our dashboard and still be doing useful work. Lots of calls or commands could mean the system is working, or that it keeps checking for updates or retrying something that failed.

We can check whether the data is complete and up to date. We may need to ask the customer whether it helped them make a useful decision. We should know which question we've answered before we count someone as activated or call an account healthy.

Inbound and growth marketing should help people put the product to work. Tell me what data I can get, what the product can do and how to use it with my other tools, including where the limits are.

Show me an API request and the data it returns, how to connect my AI tools through MCP, or a CLI command I can run. Explain what the data means and give me a working example I can adapt to my own process.

If someone connects the product but can't get usable data, they still can't do the work they came for. Unclear instructions, missing data and functions that keep failing belong in the growth review, with someone responsible for fixing them.

Talk to customers based on how they're using the product. If their connection has expired, help them get it working again. When a new capability could improve their process, show them how.

As a customer, I want to get more out of your product by using it with the other tools and data in my system. That's what I want us to help our customers do.