Make it a Product! Your API deserves more respect
May 21, 2015
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
More 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