**Posted on behalf of Kelly Jo Horton - Principal Engineer, Marketing Operations & Technology at ROOM**
@KellyJoHorton
Many of you have seen my Lead and Data Flow diagram and asked me for an editable version. I am finally getting around to making it available for anyone who is interested. It started with this.
This diagram was born out of necessity, when I started a new job at Docker, and after a quick audit of the Marketo instance decided to tackle the issue of the thousands of API errors I was seeing daily. I asked for an architecture diagram, so I could see all of the lead and data sources that could potentially be causing the errors, and one didn’t exist. So I decided to create one.
Creating this diagram has so many benefits:
- If you’re new to a company this forces you to get to know your key stakeholders, and find out who is responsible for any platform that is integrated with Marketo, and who is responsible for any external sources sending data or activities to Marketo via the REST API.
- It’s a great way to familiarize yourself with whatever new universe you just inherited. I find that mapping everything out visually really helps me evaluate and troubleshoot the current state of the stack.
- It’s a great way to learn the marketing and sales processes, and understand the lead lifecycle.
The diagram was critical to me being able to troubleshoot the thousands of API errors I was seeing every day.
I have continued this tradition since I started at ROOM, using diagrams like this as a visual roadmap for my key stakeholders. I publish them to our internal Business Systems Confluence page, and invite people to comment and suggest additions or corrections. I have a “Current State” version and a “Future State” version that is a great visual when presenting the MarTech and systems roadmap to non-technical stakeholders. I also keep a technical version that shows details like the API username for each integration, a short description of the type of data being pushed to Marketo or pulled from Marketo, and a detailed diagram of any middleware flows and triggers.
This is a great exercise for a new employee, even if this diagram already exists. Have them start from scratch and create a new one. The newbie may have a different perspective!
I have created different versions of my diagrams in draw.io and Gliffy (in Confluence). Both of these tools can import multiple file formats, so hopefully one of these will work for you. You can create a free draw.io account: Take me to draw.io
1 Comment
.png)