About the product
A CRM for a sales company. It collects leads from several marketing channels in one place, assigns them to sales reps and tracks sales progress. The reps did not want to learn a new tool, so they keep working in Google Calendar, and the CRM reads their progress from it.
What I did
For over two years I was responsible for the system’s backend: from design, through building and deployment, to maintenance and further development.
- Taking in leads from different sources and assigning them to sales reps.
- Google Calendar integration: meetings created automatically and the sales status updated from the calendar.
- Lead and assignment history, live updates in the admin panel.
- A Make integration that connects the CRM with the company’s internal automations, plus integrations with reporting tools.
- Automated tests, documentation and communication with the client.
Problems I solved
- Scattered data. Spreadsheets and manual hand-offs were replaced by one system with the full history of every lead.
- Resistance to a new tool. Sales reps update the status where they already work – in their calendar.
- A change on Google’s side. Google changed how colours work in Calendar, which would have broken the status sync. I analysed the change, verified it in practice and adapted the system before it affected the reps’ work.
- Lost changes in an integration. The client’s external automation was missing some status changes. I fixed it so nothing gets lost, while the existing integration kept working unchanged.
- Data consistency. Reassigning a lead to another rep always follows the same steps, no matter where it is triggered from.
What I learned
- Integrations with external services have to be built to survive changes you have no control over.
- When you change something a live integration depends on, backward compatibility is a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
- I verify what the documentation says in practice before it goes into production code.
- With a tool for a sales team, the most important thing is not to change people’s habits more than necessary.