The developer's journey with user lifecycle management: Before and after Scalekit
Landing enterprise customers is supposed to be a win. But for your engineering team, it means drowning in integration challenges, sync failures, and user provisioning requests that never end. One by one, new directories—Azure AD, Okta, Workday—turn into engineering quicksand. Before you know it, your team is buried under technical debt, endless patches, and middle-of-the-night incident alerts.
This is the story of how user lifecycle management consumes engineering teams—until you fight back.
Integration challenges with user directories
Your startup just landed a major enterprise deal. The excitement lasts exactly 2.3 seconds—until the first email arrives:
"We'll need real-time user provisioning with our Azure AD instance. Oh, and we have Workday for HR that needs bi-directional sync. And Okta for our subsidiaries with custom user attributes."
Forward to a few weeks later.
Azure AD’s group updates didn’t match your SCIM implementation, and now 234 users are in limbo.
Every directory has its quirks. Azure AD wants attributes one way, Okta another. JumpCloud joins the mix because your client just acquired a company. Your repo becomes a graveyard of emergency patches.
Security reviews are another challenge. Each directory sync is an additional endpoint that needs to be secured to prevent breaches. Logs are scattered across five systems, each with its own format. Your architecture diagram looks like a web of pain.
This isn't an integration. It's an expensive time sink in the long term.
The hidden tax: Lost engineering time
Every hour spent building support for newer directories is an hour not spent building your core product. Let’s break down the real cost:
Building custom connectors hijacks sprints
- 2–3 weeks of dev time per each directory integration
- Error handling for edge cases
- Documentation that's outdated
Maintenance becomes your team’s side job
- 5–10 hours per week debugging sync issues
- API key rotations at regular intervals
- Directory version updates that need rewrites on your end
Enterprise support never stops
- "Why did these users fail to provision?"
- "Can we get deeper sync logs on why these users are not syncing?"
- "Can we batch sync 10,000 users today?"
The reality check
Partnering with enterprise IT teams
Winning an enterprise deal is just the start. The real key? Winning IT teams inside your customer’s org. They need user lifecycle automation that actually works.
When user management just works, IT teams become your product champions. That’s how you drive adoption inside enterprise accounts.
Your next sprint, just a single API
Remember playing Tetris? That’s user lifecycle management today.
Each directory is a new, unpredictable block. Your team scrambles to fit Azure AD here, Okta there, HRIS data in the corner. Five systems, five formats, five security risks—until the whole thing collapses.
Then Scalekit comes along and flips the game.
Every block becomes the straight-line piece—the one that clears everything. One API that just works. No firefighting. No late-night sync failures. No security nightmares.
