Building an Application Suite of products in a fast-paced company

At Sinch, we innovate in “leaps” through acquisitions and add value to customers. So, let’s take a deeper dive into the challenges we face in building an Application Suite of products, integrating multiple acquisitions.

The Application Suite of products provide an easy way to build powerful conversational messaging experiences. Some unique capabilities include newsletters on WhatsApp/RCS, personalized rich landing pages, integration with popular business systems, chatbot that can converse in dozens of languages, human agent experience with intelligent auto routing, personalized video/images.

More than individual features, it is important that they all work together. For instance, the hand off from a chatbot to human agent needs to be smooth, with the agent seeing the full conversation history, so the end consumer doesn’t need to repeat their request. When building this product suite, for a global customer base, we face some non-trivial challenges.

First, to resist the urge to solve every problem out there. We address this challenge by having a clear strategy to focus on the conversational messaging experience, as we craft the individual product capabilities. Enabling businesses to have meaningful two-way engagement with their end consumers is key.

Second, to fully internalize that a conversation is a very diverse concept and happens differently across the world. It is but natural — we are a diverse species, with delightfully different cultures. For example, while personalized video promotions may work the best in the US over MMS, in Brazil, we need to focus on Conversational Commerce over WhatsApp. We address this challenge with a product development team that’s spread across the globe, so we can deeply understand the local needs.

Third, there is a real risk of our vision getting lost over time-zone differences and the urgency to keep the lights on. We address this challenge by having a clear SaaS Operating Model with best practices on how to run a global SaaS team. This includes organizing in cross-functional teams of 6–8 people, having standard ways of developing, testing, deploying software, being data informed in decision making etc.

Sinch enables more than 600 billion customer engagements a year. On average, that’s touching every person on planet earth 6 times a month. This is through multiple channels of communication — including email, voice, SMS/MMS, and rich messaging channels such as WhatsApp. SaaS Application Suite of products builds on this incredible connectivity strength of Sinch and makes it simple for our customers to enable rich Conversational Messaging experiences. Sending a personalized campaign to an audience segment, having a chatbot answer questions in multiple languages and transferring to a human agent, will…err…be a cinch .

From time-saving scenarios to life-changing ones, we are helping organizations to engage with their customers like never before. We are thankful for their trust and humbled by the incredible opportunity — and we are just getting started!