How Ramp saves countless engineering hours with Merge

How Ramp saves countless engineering hours with Merge

  • 43
    HR integrations offered through Merge
Molly Liu
Senior Product Manager

It's always an immediate response, which we really appreciate. That's awesome. It's been like a great partnership. We really wish that any kind of partnership that we have is like this.

PROBLEM

Integrations at the cost of everything else

Spend time with Molly Liu, a product manager at Ramp, and you realize her company’s “help you spend less” motto lives through every product decision.

Ramp doesn't just want you to spend less money but also waste less time.

See: even though they've experienced astounding growth since their founding, Ramp operates like a lean start-up while prioritizing user experience through testing. So when Molly was designing Ramp for HR, the company’s one-click employee onboarding, she knew her team's feature prioritization would have an oversized impact on the end-product experience.

“When you’re a young startup, you're still trying to figure out where to invest resources, because prioritization is key. 'We don't have that many people, we have a lot to build. And so how do we want to invest?'” Molly muses.

Ramp for HR makes onboarding employees seamless, using what Molly deems the “source of truth” in HR platforms. Where previously team admins had to manually add each new team member, Ramp for HR pulls employee data instantly from a customer's respective HR platform to:

  • Invite new employees
  • Issue cards at scale
  • Terminate employees when no longer at the company

“We can import information like manager information, department, location information, and so forth. So it's much easier: no manual work required. And all you need to do is review, click a button, and then the invite happens.”

Here’s the problem: Molly had a team of just two engineers to build this out. For Ramp to allow any customer to sync data from their HR platform would require a custom integration with that platform. But even building out integrations with major platforms, like Justworks or Bamboo HR, would be a costly investment that would take time away from developing their core product.

If Molly and her team wanted to focus on product development and helping their customer’s bottom line, the lengthy timeline to build custom integrations was simply not an option.

Solution

Merge frees Ramp to focus on what matters

Ramp had been evaluating multiple unified integration solutions. They chose Merge.

Why? Because Merge let Ramp focus on what mattered to them. As Molly explains:

“Merge allowed us to say okay – we don't want to build integrations with all these partners. We want to understand how users like to use the product first to validate our hypothesis. Merge's easy access to enabling integrations allowed us to collect feedback early on and figure out how we want to move forward”

Merge played a critical role in the product development process for Ramp. Merge’s integrations allowed Ramp to test their features at scale, without having to worry about the unending roadmap of integrations to get there.

Merge took the unnecessary pain of integrations off of Molly and her team’s hands. And it let Molly do what she does best: design a stand-out product that saves Ramp’s customers time.

Outcome

More than an integrations strategy, a partnership

Ramp was able to support 24 HR integrations and save countless engineering hours.

More importantly, Merge made sure Molly and her team were confident in their decision to trust Merge as an integration strategy at every step of the way.

Here’s how:

Delightful docs

For Molly, Merge's value first in the form of its easy-to-use, technical docs.

“The API and docs were all super, super clear to us.”

Each of Merge’s common models — our name for the standardized data we return — are easily accessible in Merge’s technical docs. Merge’s REST API returns a predictable schema regardless of the HR platform that Ramp was pulling data from.

Molly and her team never had to second-guess which fields would be returned with any given model. Merge’s docs list every field, query, and path parameter as is.

Accelerated time-to-value with high-quality integrations

Ramp initially rolled out Ramp for HR to a small percentage of customers. Within two weeks the team was confident not just in their features, but in the strength and security of the integrations supporting them to roll out Ramp for HR to their entire user base.

This success came because Merge is built on API-based integrations — meaning that quality and security are guaranteed. Merge is SOC II Type II certified and processes over 6M API requests every day.

Customer success — for all

As Molly and her team have needed additional support or clarification from the Merge team, they’ve found it in spades.

“It's always an immediate response, which we really appreciate. That's awesome. It's been like a great partnership. We really wish that any kind of partnership that we have is like this.”

We do too, Molly.

Till the next sprint.

Your Success is our success

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