API Design 101: API Product Management (2/2)

In the last part of this blog ‘API Design 101: The Basics’, we learned about APIs, their design principles, and some best practices. In this part, we will learn about API Product Management.

API Product Mindset

Like we read in the last post, developing APIs is a continuous process that should be done keeping the users in mind. This is where the concept of API product management and the team comes into play.

API product mindset dictates that APIs are like designing products and not mere one-time effort. APIs evolve with changing customer and business needs. Product mindset ensures that the team looks at ways to provide strategic value to the customer and not design it with just great architecture in mind. This means that APIs are designed with the correct scope which is not too narrow and not too broad and are flexible enough to be used in gazillions of ways to foster innovation.

This also calls for an API team that is composed of Product Managers among others. Historically, Product Managers have been seen as folks who look at the product suite and front end. However, with evolving times and the increasing role of APIs, Product Managers are required to manage APIs as a standalone product suite. Contrary to popular opinion about this kind of product management being a secondary role, API product management requires significant time and has far-reaching business impacts. It requires additional competencies such as understanding the tech infrastructure, long-lasting design, and slim tolerance for errors.

The Dream team

An API team unlike other teams has its own set of requirements. The composition of the team may vary but the team members need to perform various roles to ensure success.

Following is a brief on the same:

1. Product Manager: The manager is responsible for collecting customer needs, driving insights, ensuring cross-functional conversations, and helping develop a shared vision for the APIs. The manager is also required to understand the technical specifications and effectively communicate those benefits to the stakeholders.
2. API Architect: The architect is responsible for planning, designing, and reviewing the construction of APIs.
3. API Developer: Developers are the folks who actually build those APIs. They not only build but also ensure the availability of important resources that ensure API adoption such as discoverability and documentation.
4. API Evangelist: They represent the voice of API consumers. They ensure that the API consumers have all the necessary tools to use the APIs. They are responsible for managing developer portals, detailed info-pages, and SDKs. They also ensure internal and external outreach using hackathons, answering questions, bringing feedback, marketing APIs using SEO and targeted ads, building communities using forums, meet-ups, and conferences, and communicating clear and concise value propositions.
5. API Champion: They are responsible for connecting the value of APIs to business and strategy. Their role is to convert tech specs into metrics that track business goals such as customer satisfaction, revenues, and customer adoption. They also need strong influencing skills to procure funding and resources for API teams by providing the right visibility to internal business teams.

Design Reviews

Designing APIs and ensuring that APIs are consistent as the team expands becomes difficult. This means that we need processes and infrastructure in place. Following are some good practices for the same:

1. Design Document: A concept note describing customer needs, broad requirements, and success metrics. A Tech spec describing endpoints, events, parameters, errors, and the backend architecture
2. API reviews: Post internal reviews, get the API suite reviewed by an external team responsible for giving a green light to APIs. This external team can act as a council that consists of cross-functional members, the council checks for interoperability, consistency, migration to new infra, and the tech burden involved
3. User Testing: Launch alpha and beta versions with a smaller set of users, understand their problems, fine-tune the APIs using interviews and usage stats
4. Canary Releases: Gate in the customers slowly, ironing out the bugs further, fixing documentation, and improving error handling

To summarize, APIs have become the go-to solutions for organizations to grow their business. API product management is therefore slowly but surely coming to the center stage. This form of product management sure requires some special set of skills but honing those skills is not difficult. Additionally, becoming adept at API product management can also help PMs not only in their current API teams but later in other teams as well as they would now know the power of APIs and how to integrate them into their products.