In this episode of Request // Response, I sit down with Anuj Jhunjhunwala, who leads product and design at Merge. We talk about how Merge is transforming integration pain into product velocity with their unified API approach. Anuj shares how his team helps developers avoid the complexity of maintaining dozens of APIs, and we explore the rising strategic importance of integrations in AI-driven products. We also dive into what great developer experience really looks like and how AI is reshaping expectations around API design and usability.

Show Notes

[02:30] – The pain of building and maintaining custom integrations
[03:45] – Merge as “Plaid for B2B software” and the magic moment for devs
[07:30] – AI making integrations table stakes; the three types of data
[08:30] – Why proprietary data is the key to differentiation in AI
[09:45] – AI and the future of APIs: personalization and intuitive design
[11:30] – DX vs AX: API design for devs and for AI
[12:00] – How AI product patterns are changing API requirements
[13:00] – Richer queries, delta endpoints, and evolving API design
[14:00] – The rising importance of fine-grained permissions
[15:00] – HubSpot, search endpoints, and future-facing API choices
[16:00] – Delta endpoints explained and why they’re valuable for LLMs
[17:00] – Principles of great developer experience: predictability and frictionlessness
[19:00] – Where to learn more about Merge

Additional Quotes from the Podcast

API Integrations are Table Stakes for AI

"The biggest trend is that it's just becoming tables stakes, API integrations. We talk to a lot of AI companies. We get a lot of interest in AI companies, and there's really like three types of data. That is helpful when you're building an LLM, right? There's the public data that exists out there that's scraped from the internet and is publicly accessible. There's synthetic data, which is, you know, obviously it produced itself by an algorithm or by an LLM and can help you validate and test out edge cases. And then there's proprietary data, right? So it's the data that belongs to your customer. And the first two things there, the public and the synthetic data. Are accessible to basically anybody. The proprietary data is a data that's specific to you and makes you different, and it's a thing that no one else can get access to because it literally just belongs to you or your customer. That I think, is the magic of the integration, is that the integrations pull in that third bucket and like they can make your product different, so you're leaving money on the table if you don't have an integration strategy because you're not thinking about that third bucket, which actually makes you different."

AI's Impact on API Design and Documentation

"APIs in general just have to be extremely intuitive and easy to get started, right? So like AI, I think, spoils us at a very high level into expecting a lot of personalization, right? When you go to ChatGPT and you ask it a question, it can feel like a very pointed personal response to what you just said. It's a unique answer in many cases, like the exact question you have. Separately, but also relatedly, no one reads docs, right? No one reads anything. Um, they, you know, they just, uh, I'm at the point where if I use a third party tool or if I am figuring out how to troubleshoot something at home, the first thing I do is open up ChatGPT and like take a picture of it and say, how do I use this thing? And so I think people are using AI to personalize the type of responses they get. They expect low friction in all these encounters."

What is Great Developer Experience?

"I think ultimately what this boils down to is that great DevEx is reducing friction to the point where your team can spend its time on other high-leverage things that you'd rather spend your time on, right? That's ultimately what this is—providing leverage. It's multiplying your team. It's a force multiplier, and I think that's super powerful just because out of the box you click a few buttons on a website and it can do that for you, which is a really powerful experience in my mind."