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If you're an IT Director or VP of Engineering at a mid-market company, you likely have a growing integration backlog that keeps you up at night. Your team is spending precious time maintaining fragile custom integrations while new requests pile up. Meanwhile, the business demands more connectivity between systems, faster data flows, and better visibility across applications.
You're not alone. According to recent findings, technical teams spend an astonishing 30-50% of their time just maintaining existing integrations—time that could be spent on innovation and competitive differentiation. This article explores practical strategies to tackle your integration backlog without burning out your engineering team, and how modern approaches are transforming how mid-market companies handle system connectivity.
The most obvious impact of an integration backlog is on your engineering resources. When your best engineers are spending half their time writing, fixing, and maintaining custom API integrations, that's half their time not spent on your core product or competitive differentiators.
As one Head of Engineering described it: "Our current custom integration is becoming impossible to maintain. Engineers are spending too much time fixing broken data flows instead of building features that matter to customers."
This diversion of talent creates several compounding problems:
For mid-market companies with lean technical teams (typically 5-15 engineers responsible for integrations), this resource drain is particularly acute. You can't afford to have your limited talent pool tied up in "plumbing" rather than building your competitive edge.
Beyond the engineering impact, integration backlogs directly affect business operations. When systems don't talk to each other efficiently, the consequences ripple throughout the organization:
One particularly telling statistic: companies with significant data silos report 20-30% longer sales cycles and 15-25% lower customer satisfaction scores compared to peers with integrated systems.
For mid-market firms in growth mode, these inefficiencies can be the difference between hitting ambitious targets and stalling out. A RevOps leader for a logistics company put it bluntly: "We were making million-dollar decisions on data that was 24 hours out of date. That's not just inefficient—it's dangerous."
When facing an integration backlog, IT leaders typically consider three approaches:
Pros:
Cons:
Pros:
Cons:
Pros:
Cons:
Each approach has merits, but for mid-market companies with growing integration backlogs and limited resources, none of these traditional options offers an ideal balance of capability, agility, and efficiency.
Not all integrations are created equal. Start by categorizing your backlog:
Then evaluate each integration against these criteria:
This framework helps you make informed decisions about which integrations to tackle first, which to defer, and which might deserve alternative approaches.
For example, an integration between your CRM and ERP that affects order processing might be both high-impact and complex—making it a prime candidate for a robust, long-term solution rather than a quick fix.
Traditional point-to-point integrations create a tangled web that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Modern integration approaches offer more sustainable alternatives:
Instead of directly connecting systems, implement an event bus (like Kafka) where systems publish events and subscribe to relevant updates. This decouples your applications and creates a more flexible foundation.
Create a unified API layer that standardizes how your applications communicate, reducing the complexity of individual integrations and providing consistent governance.
For operational data that needs to be in multiple systems, consider real-time database synchronization that keeps records consistent without complex application-level integration.
One VP of Engineering reported: "Moving from point-to-point integrations to a database-centric sync approach cut our integration maintenance by 80%. Engineers could work with familiar database interfaces instead of wrestling with different APIs."
The integration landscape has evolved beyond traditional iPaaS and point solutions. Specialized platforms now exist that focus specifically on real-time, bidirectional synchronization with an emphasis on developer experience.
Solutions like Stacksync offer:
These platforms are particularly well-suited for mid-market companies that need enterprise-grade reliability without the complexity and cost of traditional enterprise solutions.
One IT Director shared: "After trying to build our Salesforce-to-database sync for months, we implemented Stacksync in an afternoon. It saved us from adding two additional engineers just to manage integrations."
Not every integration needs to go through your engineering team. By providing business users with self-service tools for simpler integrations, you can:
Look for integration platforms that offer:
For example, enabling a marketing analyst to sync campaign data between your marketing automation platform and CRM through a guided interface can remove multiple tickets from your engineering backlog.
Rather than attempting to solve your entire integration backlog at once, consider a phased approach:
Focus first on ensuring your most business-critical integrations are reliable and maintainable, even if that means tactical improvements to existing solutions.
Implement your chosen architecture or platform for new integrations and begin migrating high-priority existing integrations.
Methodically move remaining integrations to your new approach as resources allow, prioritizing those with high maintenance burdens.
With your foundation in place, focus on using integration capabilities to enable new business opportunities rather than just maintaining the status quo.
This measured approach allows you to show incremental value while working toward a more strategic solution.
[Image: Alt text for visualization of integration architecture before and after transformation]
Echo, a mid-market company providing interactive e-commerce solutions, faced significant integration challenges as they scaled their operations, particularly with an expanded partnership with Walmart. Their integration issues were becoming a critical bottleneck:
As Yuval Hofshy, Director at Echo, described it: "Controlling our business became a huge challenge. We had too many excel spreadsheets, too many out-of-sync issues, and significant overhead just ensuring data accuracy."
Echo implemented Stacksync to directly connect their HubSpot CRM with a standard MySQL database. This database-centric approach aligned with their engineering practices, allowing developers to use familiar tools and workflows.
The implementation delivered immediate and strategic benefits:
Perhaps most significantly, they avoided a high-risk custom API project estimated at 10+ developer-months, delivering substantial cost savings and freeing engineers to focus on core product features.
Hofshy summarized the impact: "Stacksync makes my problem disappear... instead of struggling with the HubSpot [API]... we can focus on our core technology. This is money well spent."
The integration backlog that feels like a burden today can become a strategic advantage tomorrow with the right approach. By adopting modern integration architectures, leveraging specialized platforms, and implementing a phased migration strategy, mid-market IT leaders can:
The key is recognizing that integration is no longer just a technical challenge—it's a strategic business capability that deserves an intentional approach.
As you evaluate how to tackle your integration backlog, consider how modern solutions like Stacksync can help you transform integration from a source of technical debt into a foundation for agility and growth.
Discover how leading mid-market companies are eliminating their integration backlogs without draining engineering resources. Schedule a consultation to assess your specific integration challenges and explore solutions tailored to your technology stack and business priorities.
