Pipedrive
Introduction
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) software designed to help small businesses grow. Designed by salespeople for salespeople, Pipedrive offers an in-app Marketplace for users to integrate all the tools in their tech stack.
To make the integration creation possible, Pipedrive offers an extensive external developer portal called the Pipedrive Developers’ Corner – the heart of all app and custom development. The comprehensive portal provides a development and sandbox platform called Developer Hub, alongside vast amount of educational resources, tools, and documentation for developers looking to integrate their applications or services with Pipedrive.
The Developers’ Corner is modeled after Pipedrive’s award-winning customer-centric mindset and easy-to-use design and UX principles. Our aim is to provide a streamlined and efficient development experience that allows developers to make their first API call in just a few clicks and simply create an app integration that will serve as a business on top of Pipedrive’s platform.
Within the Developers’ Corner, Pipedrive also offers a Developers’ Community – an open forum for troubleshooting integration and development issues with a personal touch and direct access to help in addition to traditional support channels. The community also functions as a helpful feedback channel for learning how to best offer an excellent developer experience for Pipedrive’s users and app developers.
Why nominated
Best New DX Innovation
The Pipedrive Developer Hub represents a groundbreaking approach to boosting developer experience. With just a few clicks, developers can create a sandbox account and initiate the integration process between two or more different services, eliminating unnecessary complexities and reducing time-to-market.
One of our key focuses has been to offer easy access to all the features necessary for seamless app building with Pipedrive. Developer Hub provides a comprehensive and intuitive interface where developers can effortlessly explore and utilize all possible integration features. An example is our Helper sections, which have been curated to provide relevant and context-specific documentation that aligns with each stage of the development process.
A distinguishing feature of Developer Hub is the inclusion of pending changes functionality inspired by the familiar GitHub branching logic. This unique capability allows developers to work on and release new functionality to their apps without disrupting the live apps in the Marketplace. They can make changes, experiment, and test their ideas with ease before finalizing and deploying them.
Our UX experience is meticulously designed to align with the app development process. We have strategically incorporated educational materials at the right place and the right time, guiding developers through each step seamlessly.
Developer Hub accommodates multiple business personas and caters to their specific needs. For instance, we offer two different in-house solutions for apps – public and private apps and allow marketing personas to work alongside developers to collaborate on different aspects of the integration process.
Overall, Developer Hub is here to present a whole new integration experience by simplifying the initial steps, offering comprehensive documentation support, incorporating pending changes functionality, aligning with the app development process, and catering to diverse personas.
As this is only the start, we believe our commitment to developer success through our continuous innovation of Developer Hub certainly qualifies us for the Best New DX Innovation!
Best Onboarding
The onboarding process of Pipedrive’s Developers’ Corner continuously provides customer-centric flows following industry standard terminology and unifications across the entire platform.
From the first entrance to the main landing page, developers and potential partners are invited to sign up for a sandbox account or browse a wide variety of educational materials and documentation to start planning out their use cases and business opportunities.
This is all supported by powerful navigation and search, covering all resources from the Developer Hub sandbox platform to publicly available use cases, our API reference and interactive tutorial documentation. All publicly available materials are easily accessible and discoverable, alongside a specifically-for-onboarding use-cases area to support integration planning and design.
Registration for a sandbox account takes the user a couple of clicks. They will then be immediately sent to the sandbox environment after log-in, where they are supported by clear process descriptions, options to build as well as quick access to key educational resources – interactive tutorials and business use cases.
The app-building journey follows the usual development steps, encompassing a new take on DX, giving immediate access to tokens, scopes and app extensions (our platform access points), whilst leaving all marketing and business information requirements to a later stage. This allows different user types to work together on one app. The clear user interface doesn’t allow any distractions for the developers.
For getting started with the API, Pipedrive provides a wide range of supporting tooling, so all levels of developers, from citizens to professionals, can choose their preferred platform to start testing and playing with the API. This includes our automatically updated Postman collection, open specification file, SDKs, easily navigable documentation and thorough API Reference environment.
Best API Reference Documentation
Pipedrive’s API Reference includes thorough documentation across the whole API offering of different API resources and their endpoints. It is publicly available without any log-in needed and is accompanied by a clear design and helpful search capabilities to navigate between different endpoints.
The reference starts with an overview of the technical details, quick access to supporting developer documentation, specification export capabilities, client libraries and the sandbox account.
Navigation within the API Reference is supported by alphabetically-listed API resources, where each endpoint is listed by its HTTP method (in the order of GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). Each endpoint’s name includes a color-coded label of the HTTP method for improved readability and clarity. The same helpful color coding is also carried over to the search.
Each documentation page for an API resource and the accompanying endpoints includes clear descriptions of the behavior of the endpoints and their parameters, parameter data types and expected values, and full example response examples. Where applicable, the description points to supporting documentation and tutorials. The main goal behind the look and feel of the API Reference is to provide an all-in-one clear, concise, and straight-to-the-point documentation for the API while linking to more in-depth information on the Developer Documentation’s side.
Additionally, API Reference breaches out to various development support and alternative tooling to cater to all different developer’s preferences, including:
- Our developer documentation, which covers best practices, ERD diagrams of the API, and core concepts like authorization, rate limiting, success/error response logic and HTTP status codes
- API specification file to enable importing it to the developer’s tool of choice
- A public collection in Postman that incorporates all API updates and improvements automatically and enables testing the endpoints with an authorization method of one’s choosing. The collection can be forked to one’s workspace in Postman with 3 clicks from each API resource page and/or the main landing page.
- Automatically updated API client libraries in Node.js and PHP with community-built libraries in Python, .NET and Ruby
- A free sandbox account to equip developers with a safe development and testing environment and token management.
- Transparent, automatic communications around API updates via our Changelog
With the goal of supporting the discovery and awareness around all API and Developer Platform updates, a public changelog page is provided for announcements. Every customer subscribed to the changelog receives an automatic email notification about upcoming improvements and/or new additions. Additionally, direct emails are sent to all customers who are expected to be affected by an API update to assist them in migrating to the new behavior promptly. The public announcements include invitations to the Developers’ Community as a channel for providing feedback and having Pipedrive’s engineering team support the customer directly in case of any issues.
