Checkpoints Feature
Hoa Nguyen
Hoa Nguyen
August 13, 2025 • 5 min read

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The Engineering-Marketing Challenge

It’s a common scenario in many organizations. The marketing team develops an innovative idea for the referral program. They’re enthusiastic and ready to implement it, but then they encounter the engineering bottleneck. “We’ll add it to the backlog.” “Maybe next quarter.” “We need to prioritize bug fixes first.” Meanwhile, engineers are concerned about marketing requests diverting them from their planned roadmap and core development priorities. Today, we’re excited to announce Checkpoints – our solution to this cross-departmental challenge. This feature is designed to improve collaboration between engineering and marketing teams while enhancing your referral program’s effectiveness.

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What Makes Checkpoints Different?

While many referral platforms can reward actions beyond sign-ups, Flock’s Checkpoints feature offers unique advantages for both technical and marketing teams:

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1. One-Time Integration for Engineers

With Checkpoints, your engineering team only needs to integrate once. They simply:
  • Identify key user actions in your product
  • Add a few lines of code to mark these checkpoints
  • Transfer control to the marketing team
This eliminates the ongoing back-and-forth between teams for campaign adjustments and removes engineering bottlenecks when marketers want to test new approaches.

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2. Complete Flexibility for Marketers

Once checkpoints are integrated, marketers gain unprecedented control:
  • Configure which checkpoints trigger rewards in each campaign
  • A/B test different reward triggers efficiently
  • Adjust strategies based on real-time data without requiring engineering resources
  • Launch new campaigns with different reward structures in minutes, not weeks

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The Business Impact

This approach fundamentally changes how teams collaborate and how quickly you can optimize your referral program:

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Accelerated Experimentation

Traditional referral programs often require engineering work for each new reward trigger, leading to:
  • Slow iteration cycles
  • Limited testing opportunities
  • Suboptimal conversion rates
With Checkpoints, marketers can run multiple experiments simultaneously:
  • Test if rewarding at sign-up, first purchase, or subscription conversion drives better results
  • Compare different reward triggers across customer segments
  • Quickly identify which actions yield the highest quality referrals

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Real-World Example: Finding the Optimal Reward Trigger

A Flock customer in the SaaS space wanted to optimize their referral program. With Checkpoints:
  1. Their engineering team integrated checkpoints at five key moments in the user journey:
    • Account creation
    • Completing onboarding
    • Creating first project
    • Inviting team members
    • Converting to paid plan
  2. Their marketing team then created three parallel campaigns with different reward triggers:
    • Campaign A: Reward at account creation
    • Campaign B: Reward at first project creation
    • Campaign C: Reward at paid conversion
  3. After just two weeks of testing, they discovered that:
    • Campaign A generated the most referrals but had the lowest conversion to paid users
    • Campaign C had fewer referrals but 3x higher revenue per referral
    • Campaign B struck the perfect balance between volume and quality
Without requiring additional engineering changes, they optimized their program to use the most effective reward trigger, increasing referral revenue by 78%.

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Simple Implementation

Adding Checkpoints to your referral program requires minimal engineering effort:

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For Engineers:

Flock.shared.checkpoint(
  name: "first_order_placed"
)
That’s it. Implement once, then hand control to your marketing team to focus on their core development priorities.

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For Marketers:

Once checkpoints are implemented, marketers can:
  1. Define checkpoints and create campaigns in the Flock dashboard
  2. Select which checkpoint should trigger rewards
Checkpoints Trigger
  1. Launch and monitor performance
  2. Adjust reward triggers as needed without any code changes
  3. Present performance improvements at your next team meeting

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Getting Started with Checkpoints

Ready to bridge the gap between engineering and marketing? Here’s how to get started:
  1. Identify your key user actions – Work with your product team to map the user journey and identify meaningful checkpoints
  2. Implement checkpoint tracking – Have your engineers add the simple checkpoint calls at these key moments
  3. Empower your marketing team – Show them how to configure different reward triggers for different campaigns
  4. Test and iterate – Use our analytics to see which checkpoints drive the best results

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Conclusion

Referral marketing shouldn’t be constrained by engineering resources, and engineers shouldn’t have to interrupt their workflow for every marketing experiment. With Checkpoints, we’ve created a solution that respects engineers’ time while giving marketers the freedom to experiment and optimize. The most successful referral programs aren’t static—they evolve based on data and testing. Checkpoints give you the infrastructure to make this evolution seamless, collaborative, and driven by results rather than resource constraints. Ready to empower your marketing team while simplifying life for your engineers? Contact our team for a personalized demo, or log in to your dashboard to start setting up your first checkpoint today.
Flock is a mobile-first referral platform designed to help apps grow through word-of-mouth. Our platform makes it easy to launch, manage, and optimize referral programs without months of development time.