connecting product catalogs across disparate systems

Written Article: How to Help Non-Technical Teammates Understand Your Tech-Heavy Product, Pivotal Built to Adapt

users: n/a – backend functionality only

problem: merging product catalogs with similar yet different items and attributes from one company system downstream to a set of companies recently acquired

goal: to start, publish a product catalog change in one system, see the change in the other system – with minimal impact to either existing side

product features: 

• update one product attribute in one company’s product data management tool, data trickles downstream to a topic where it waits to be consumed…

• … when the other company triggers a REST app to retrieve and store the attribute data in the cloud…

• … which triggers a pub/sub to alert a batch fetch process to retrieve the data…

• … which then reformats and stages the data to be consumed by downstream systems

lessons learned: 

• it’s easier to talk about invisible backend behavior by personifying the systems themselves

• simplify complex integrations by focusing on making the connections first with minimal data migration, then iterate on content being ingested