Aligning on core personas

Ampersand provides an SDK, hosted service, and UI library for developers building products that need to integrate with existing systems of record. For example, a company like Clay—which builds AI for personalized outreach—uses Ampersand to let its customers sync Clay with other tools in their ecosystem such as Salesforce or HubSpot.

Clay’s engineers, whom we call the builders, are the ones who pay for Ampersand. The end users, or consumers, interact with Ampersand’s UI library within Clay to set up and manage these integrations. These users are typically non-technical but are deeply familiar with their organization’s SaaS tools.

Prioritizing for MVP

Some concepts that impressed investors weren’t as valuable to builders, so we deprioritized them.

For example, we learned that getting setup and configuration right was far more important than consumer-facing observability, so we shifted resources accordingly.

Additionally, some of the more creative observability visualizations were streamlined in favor of direct, no-frills UIs that deliver value quickly.

Information architecture

Early on, I designed the builder dashboard to show integration instances from both customer- and provider-centric perspectives. Each instance has two key attributes: the customer and the integration source (later called the ‘provider’). While both views were useful, Lauren and I chose to start with the provider-centric view—focusing on each integration source—so we could simplify the MVP and use our resources most effectively.

Handling edge cases

Initially, the UI library was optimized for an average Salesforce integration—covering a few standard objects and common fields.

As we brought on customers, however, we found a wide variety of unique requirements:

1. Many objects

2. Numerous optional fields

3. Complex field mappings

4. Multiple permissions/actions (read, update, subscribe)

5. No-config objects

6. A separate UI for first-run and subsequent runs

7. The ability to turn off objects later

8. Changing authentication later

As I encountered each new use case, I iteratively adjusted the UI library to accommodate it while maintaining a cohesive, long-term view of the design.

Self-serve onboarding

Unlike most integration platforms that require a sales process, Ampersand wants to make it easy for developers to try the platform for free.

After designing a few onboarding variations, I ran a research study with developers who fit our ICP. Participants started from the marketing page and had time to explore the docs and then set up integrations.

The study revealed gaps in developers' understanding of certain concepts and setup steps, which led us to rename concepts and put more emphasis key ideas in our marketing and documentation.

A long-term view on scale

My experience designing admin tools at New Relic helped guide the team in designing a scalable access architecture, including organizations, projects, and a roadmap for future objects like teams to integrate smoothly into the system.

I also established a design system based on Simple UI, implementing both primitive and semantic tokens to make design and front-end workflows more efficient and consistent.

Landing site

Instead of outsourcing the marketing site, I designed it from scratch in-house and managed contract developers who implemented it using the Astro framework. All content is tracked in GitHub and written in Markdown, allowing the team to easily iterate on content.