Partner Onboarding
The repeatable process by which an external organisation is connected, tested and moved to production — and a common hidden bottleneck.
Technically an integration takes days; onboarding routinely takes months, because most of the elapsed time is not engineering: contracts, security review, network connectivity, credential exchange, test data agreement, certification and sign-off.
What reduces it, in order of effect. A self-service sandbox with realistic synthetic data, so a partner can build and test without any interaction from you — this removes the largest queue. Published specifications and generated clients, so integration does not begin with a document exchange. Automated certification: a defined test suite the partner runs against the sandbox, whose passing is the entry criterion for production. Standard connectivity options rather than a bespoke network arrangement per partner.
The operational half matters as much: a support channel, clear error semantics so a partner can diagnose their own problems, and per-partner observability so "it is not working" can be answered from evidence.