When Your Source of Truth Isn't Really Yours: Lessons from Cross-Team Integrations

What happens when another team integrates directly with your Source of Truth and their needs start limiting your ability to evolve your platform?

In this talk, I will share lessons learned from operating a Source of Truth that supported critical business processes while also serving as a dependency for another team through a complex, poorly documented integration. Because the integration was tightly coupled and the consuming team had different organizational priorities, even small improvements to data models, processes, and workflows became difficult to implement.

The session explores the challenges that arise when ownership, responsibilities, and priorities are not clearly separated between teams, and how these issues can slow down innovation and increase operational risk.

I will also discuss practical approaches that helped improve collaboration and reduce complexity, including:
– Creating simpler and more stable interfaces between teams
– Clearly documenting ownership, expectations, and integration contracts
– Implementing automated and continuous testing to detect breaking changes early
– Reducing coupling to enable independent evolution of systems and processes

Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for designing team boundaries and integrations that scale with both technical and organizational change.