In this discussion, Cristina Flaschen, CEO of Pandium, interviews Archna Carlstone, Head of Product at Carputty, about building, scaling, and evolving SaaS platforms, with a focus on Carputty’s journey from an internal finance tool to a white-labeled SaaS product for partners and customers.

Carputty’s Origin and Product Evolution

• Carputty was founded in October 2020, with Carlstone as an early team member, focusing on building both consumer-facing and internal tools.
• The company’s flagship product, the Carputty Flexline, offers a line of credit for car purchases, underwriting consumers rather than vehicles, flipping the traditional dealership financing model.
• Initially, the platform was built to serve Carputty’s own finance operations, but as the product matured, the team recognized broader industry pain points and began offering the platform as a white-labeled SaaS solution for other businesses.

Transition to SaaS and White-Labeling

• The decision to transition into SaaS was driven by market demand and the flexibility of being a startup, allowing Carputty to move quickly and adapt the platform for external partners.
• Early challenges included abstracting out company-specific features to make the platform scalable and universal, such as removing Carputty-specific labels and building a more modular, customizable system.
• The team implemented an abstraction layer for integrations (e.g., different banking providers) and a global design system to balance customization with maintainability for partners.

Product Team Structure and Development Approach

• Carputty’s product and engineering teams operate in lean, cross-functional pods focused on core areas: consumer applications, transactions (asset management), and data.
• This structure supports focus, knowledge sharing, and agility as the company grows and adapts to new partner needs.

Integrations and Partnerships

• Integrations are central to Carputty’s strategy, with an API abstraction layer enabling flexibility in vendor selection and servicing partners.
• Carputty partners with various organizations, including banks and companies like Turo, offering tailored solutions based on partner requirements rather than a one-size-fits-all package.

Core Values and Customer Focus

• Carputty’s core values include being data-driven, tenacious, thinking big, empowerment, and transparency, with transparency being especially central.
• The company emphasizes transparency in financing, aiming to disrupt the traditional, opaque dealership model and empower consumers with clear information about rates and valuations.

Advice for Product Managers

• Carlstone advises product managers transitioning internal tools to external products to continually question scalability and universality, recognize and address internal biases, and be willing to push back on internal requests that do not align with long-term vision.
• She emphasizes the importance of admitting mistakes, iterating on architecture, and balancing speed with building a sustainable, scalable product.

Closing Thoughts

• The discussion highlights the complexities of evolving a fintech product into a SaaS platform, the importance of abstraction and modularity, and the ongoing trade-offs between customization and product stability.
• Carputty’s journey offers valuable lessons for teams considering a similar transition, particularly around organizational structure, integration strategy, and maintaining core values throughout growth.

For more insights on tech partnerships, integrations, and APIs, listeners are encouraged to visit Pandium’s blog and resources.

In this discussion, Cristina sits down with Faria Anzum, Developer Experience Product Design Lead at Canva, to explore her approach to SaaS integrations, developer experience, as well as the impact of AI on building scalable partner ecosystems.

Faria’s Role and Canva’s Ecosystem Approach

Faria leads developer experience within Canva’s ecosystem team, focusing on optimizing the end-to-end journey for developers—from discovery and documentation to app submission and launch. Her work spans both external developers and internal teams, ensuring feedback loops that drive continuous improvement in tooling and processes.

Building for Developers: Key UX Considerations

• Faria highlights the importance of systems thinking in developer experience, noting that every design decision impacts multiple stages of the developer journey.
• Unique challenges include blending Canva’s established design system with the distinct UIs of external apps, ensuring a seamless and intuitive experience for users.
• Developer tools must minimize cognitive load and context switching, so Canva strives for consistency across documentation, tooling, and theming to reduce friction for developers moving between environments.

Best Practices for Scalable Integrations

• Canva empowers partners to build at scale by providing robust building blocks: app templates, design patterns, and a comprehensive Figma UI kit. This approach streamlines development and ensures consistency in user experience.
• The team collaborates closely with partners through workshops and design reviews, fostering high-quality integrations and reducing surprises during app submission.
• Smaller partners particularly benefit from these resources, as they can rely on Canva’s design guidance without needing in-house expertise.

AI’s Transformative Role in Developer Workflows

• AI is lowering barriers to entry, democratizing software development much like Canva did for design. Tools like ChatGPT and Cursor enable even non-coders to build functional integrations using natural language prompts.
• Canva recently launched Dev MCP server, for Canva apps and integrations, leveraging documentation and starter templates to accelerate development.
• While Canva can’t always distinguish how much of an app is AI-generated, the focus remains on functionality and quality, not the origin of the code.

Looking Ahead: Trust, Transparency, and the Future of AI in Integrations

• Faria emphasizes the need for transparency in AI-driven apps—clearly communicating what AI does, how data is used, and allowing users to override AI suggestions to build trust.
• She predicts a future where AI agents handle more of the integration lifecycle, spinning up apps from natural language descriptions, while human developers refine and innovate at the edges.
• The conversation closes with a call to embrace these changes, as AI and automation free up developers to focus on more creative and high-impact work.

Key Takeaways

• Canva’s approach to developer experience centers on holistic design, strong building blocks, and close collaboration with partners.
• AI is fundamentally changing how integrations are built, making development more accessible and efficient.
• Trust, transparency, and adaptability will be crucial as AI-driven workflows become the norm in SaaS ecosystems.

For more insights on tech partnerships, integrations, and APIs, listeners are encouraged to visit Pandium’s blog and resources.

https://www.pandium.com/blog

In this episode of Between Product and Partnerships, Cristina Flaschen sat down with Shrijit Patel, Technical Product Manager at Chronograph, to talk about building integration infrastructure, developing anti-fragile systems, and bridging the technical gap as a backend-focused PM.

Drawing from his experience at Accenture, FIS, Amazon, and now Chronograph, Shrijit broke down what most PMs miss when thinking about integrations and backend product strategy.

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Blog: https://www.pandium.com/blog

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