Products fail in the gaps between screens. A booking that never texts. A payout that never emails. A calendar that silently disconnects. Glue is the job.
We spend a surprising amount of senior engineering time on messages. Twilio SMS when the user is not in the app. Transactional email when the money moved. In-app badges when they are. Calendar OAuth that has to stay connected after the demo. None of it photographs like a hero shot. All of it is why people trust a product the second week.
Delivery is a feature
A “we sent it” row in the database is not delivery. Carriers fail. Users reply STOP. Templates get stale. We log provider IDs, statuses, and the last error in the admin so an operator can answer “did they get it?” without us grepping production. If we cannot see it, we do not claim it.
Idempotency, or you will double-text
Jobs retry. Users double-click. Webhooks replay. Notification sends have to be safe to run twice. This is the same discipline as payments, applied to a smaller embarrassment. We would rather a unique key in the queue than an apology in the inbox.
Compliance lives here too
Consent, quiet hours, and “this is a transactional message, not marketing” are product rules. They belong in code, not in a hope. When we wire SMS and email into a marketplace or a multi-tenant site, those rules ship with the first template.
If your app looks finished and still feels flaky after the click, look at the glue with us.