Your API Deserves More Respect: Make It A Product
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Make it a Product! Your API deserves more respect
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Your API Deserves More Respect: Make It A Product Andrew Seward, Technical Product Manager, Esendex Your API is a product in its own right - it has its own customer base, its own target market, customer journeys, interface considerations, profit margins, features, bugs, strengths and weaknesses. That idea is an easy sell for most of us here, but how do you get your whole company on board, particularly when many of your colleagues haven't heard of APIs before? I will share my experience of changing how Esendex thinks about and approaches its API - where we were with our API and how we went about raising it to be our main product. What worked, what didn't, what problems we encountered, how we overcame them and what we're still trying to figure out. We also want to hear from you and your experiences so we can all benefit from the conclusions you've drawn.
Transcript of Your API Deserves More Respect: Make It A Product
Make it a Product!Your API deserves more respect
Today we will cover
● Brief introduction● Your API is a Product
○ Why that matters● Treating your API as a product● Getting everyone on board● Discussion
YOUR API IS A PRODUCT
Features
Quirks Customer journeys
Bugs
Things that are great
Things that suck
Customers
PackagingInstructions
People who love it
People who don’t love it
Does your API have
● A target audience?● A marketing strategy?● A sales strategy?● A development plan?● A support process?
Your users don’t want an API
They want a product that solves their problem
Why don’t we already treat all APIs as
Products?
A Mars bar
An API
?
How do we talk about our APIs?
Did you mention any of these things
● REST● How great it works with programming
language X● How it’s secured (API keys, OAuth, Basic
auth, etc.)
Talk about what you can do with it and why
Not how it works
Less of this
APIs as products
When talking about your API…
Talk about these first: ● What it does● How customers can benefit from it● How easy it is to use
Talk about these later:● How does what it does● How you integrate with it● How RESTful it is● How well it works with ELK stacks and Hadoop clusters,
and C#, Java, PHP, Node, Scala, Ruby, Python, Perl, Lisp, Ada, Swift...
Getting the team on board
API Training
Make sure everybody understands
● What your product is● Who uses it● How they benefit● How it performs● How we talk about it
Change how you talk about your API
to change how you think about it
Today we covered
● Brief introduction● Your API is a Product
○ Why that matters● Treating your API as a product● Getting everyone on board
Discuss
