Connect your tools

What you'll get

Teams that work from your real numbers instead of your description of them. Each connection moves a category of work from MEDIUM evidence, built from what you said, to HIGH, built from what is measured, and that upgrade then applies on its own to every future request touching that data. Budget a few minutes per connection, and connect only the tools you actually use.

Connect in value order, not all at once

There is no prize for connecting everything on day one. The right first connection is simply the tool that holds the numbers you ask about most, so let your own questions choose the order:

• Stripe first if your questions are about revenue, since burn, pricing, and retention all anchor on billing truth.
• HubSpot first if your questions are about pipeline, because deal diagnostics and outbound read the CRM.
• PostHog first if your questions are about product behavior, the activation, conversion, and churn signals.
• Google Drive early in any case, because it is where document deliverables land (chapter 25).
• Slack, GitHub, and Supabase as the teams that use them come into play, and Notion, Linear, and Figma when your own tooling makes them relevant.

The steps

1. Tell Marg what to connect. Say "connect Stripe," or any tool above, and it walks you through the rest: where the API key lives inside that product, where it goes, and the restart that activates it. You wire a connection once and it persists across sessions.

2. Hand over read-scoped keys where you can. Most tools issue restricted or read-only keys, and those are the right ones to give. Marg's approval gates already protect write actions (chapter 26), so a read-scoped key is a second lock on the same door, at the source this time.

3. Verify on the next request. Ask something the new connection should answer ("what was MRR last month?") and look at the evidence grade on the reply. HIGH means the connection is live and working.

What comes back

Grades track reality on every request rather than being set once. When everything a workflow needs is connected, the work grades HIGH. When one critical tool is missing, the grade drops to MEDIUM and the team carries on with what you supply. When a connected tool is simply down, the report says so and proceeds at the lower grade instead of stalling. The principle holds throughout: an outage or a gap costs you precision, never progress.

Variations

• No connections at all is still a fully supported way to run Marg. Every team works conversationally, the grades read MEDIUM, and nothing in this manual is closed to you.
• Staged adoption is the normal path. Most companies connect one tool in the first week and add the next only when a team's work would visibly improve with it.

If something goes wrong

• The grade stayed MEDIUM after connecting: the session needs a restart to pick up the new connection, or the key is missing a scope the query needs. Restart first, then recheck the scope.
• A connection that worked yesterday degraded today: the provider is most likely having an outage, which the report will already have noted. Rerun the affected work once the tool is back.
• You rotated an API key: the old connection fails quietly until you update it. Tell Marg you rotated the key, and it walks you through swapping it in.