API as a product

API as a product

2020, Oct 25    

Application Programming interfaces (API) is one of the technology approach that connects system. Yet as it involves, more perspectives start to emerge and becomes key part of business strategy/capability, as well as customer experience. It starts to fundamentally decides how fast and how wide you can evolve your business ecosystem.

Question 1:

Do you characterize API as integration technology or business capability?

API economy

As called out in Harvard Business Review, The Strategic Value of APIs, more and more business delivered its revenue via API:

  • Salesforce: 50%+
  • Ebay: 60%
  • Expedia: 90%
  • Github: 60%

The success is not only about integration at technolgy, it changes your sales experience, customer onboarding, customer experience, customer support, development and much more.

In the past few years, especially in FinTech, companies has turned “API-first platform or even Developer-Frist platform” as their key differentiator of their business, for e.g: Marqeta, Stripe, Privacy.com

To build API as part of business differentiatiator, this would require the introduction of “API as a product” thinking.

Question 2:

How does your API contribute to your business success today?

API as a product

ThoughtWorks Tech Radar firstly put “API as a product” as trial on Nov 2016. What makes “API as a product” thinking different from traditional integration can be summarized into following:

  • Introduce the role of Customer officially, know who the customer is and understand the want and pain of the customer.
  • Have a customer advocate in the team, for e.g: Technical Product Manager/Owner to advocate for customer and drive for continuous improvement
  • Experiment quickly
  • Developer experience as the first class citizen. This applies to both external developers and internal developers
  • Setup business metrics from the very beginning like: customers, customers per API, transaction per second, volume, availability, time to restore, time to deploy, versions and etc
  • Govern the life cycle of APIs, not only creating new APIs, but also how to upgrade, support and decommission APIs. Enable self-service
  • Incremental delivery
  • continuous improvement
  • Enable self service, reduce the complexity and barriers to entry, like any online product
  • Rebuild your communication strategy to your customers, across the entire product life cycle

The lens of “API as a product” thinking has to start with customer, start with a clear value proposition and use fast experiments to drive the continuous improvement.

Question 3:

Who is the customer of your APIs and do you understand their needs and painpoint?

Changes to expect

Have the organizations to adopt “API as a product” thinking requires holistic approaches, be prepared to expect changes for following:

  • Value proposition for API
  • Business strategy alignment
  • Organizational
  • Setup API product teams to understand customers behaviors, drive adoption and ongoing development
  • Making decisions using data
  • Governance of APIs
  • Engineering practices
  • Capability and hiring
  • Reshape operational process, for e.g: customer support, marketing, finance, sales, customer onboarding and etc

Question 4:

Where would you like to start first and what is your first experiment?

In the following blogs, will explore more around the team setup, engineering practices and etc.

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# API # product