Utilizing APIs (for Non-tech)
Vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, Kristin R. Moyer, said “The API economy is an enabler for turning a business or organization into a platform. Platforms multiply value creation because they enable business ecosystems inside and outside of the enterprise to consummate matches among users and facilitate the creation and/or exchange of goods, services and social currency so that all participants are able to capture value.”
At Mergeable, we couldn’t agree more with Kristin and we believe the platforms that are going succeed in enabling this type of ecosystem, are those that are dead simple to use, no matter your level of technical expertise.
Everyone from sales to customer success should have the ability to derive value from the API layer, without having to write a bunch of code or tap into engineering resources.
API Evolution
In a presentation from their 2017 Summit, Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz starts describing the API economy by drawing a comparison to the early days of the automotive industry.
In the 1920s manufactures essentially had to build a car from scratch and today there is a tremendous amount of independent companies that feed into that ecosystem, building and selling products as small as something like a spring or screw. As markets grow “the unit for which you can build a company shrinks.” We’ve seen a similar evolution in computing as well, starting in the 1960s with the mainframe, the opportunity evolved and software and PCs were developed and we continued to see abstractions of these earlier layers with the creation of the App, OS, OEM, Silicon, etc.
Today, we’re witnessing the next level of expansion where the app itself is being disaggregated and independent components of it are giving way to companies. Think Twilio, Sendgrid, and Stripe.
What is an API?
For those new to APIs, or Application Programming Interface, they are ways to send and receive information between different parts, that is, communicate between software applications. Very simply, they give companies and users “access to data and competencies they wouldn’t otherwise have — or better yet, that they no longer need — by letting even non-tech and small companies combine these building blocks to get exactly what they want.” For more of a deep-dive, Peter Gazarov provides an intelligent overview in this freeCodeCamp post on Medium.
There are three types of APIs; internal (communication between apps and internal LOBs apps), partner (open to a very specific group of companies), and public, or open API, may be used both by developers inside the organization or outside who wish to register for access (i.e. Stripe or Shippo).
Use Cases
There are a great number of use cases (more in depth use cases) for APIs but because Mergeable is focused on the Customer Evolution, we’ll distill them to a few that should resonate with sales, customer success, and product teams.
If you’re in sales, you might be interested in taking something like customer requirements and mapping those to specific actions — API calls (e.g. ‘run a backup’, ‘create a report’, etc.) — so that you can track, in real-time, how someone is progressing through the sales cycle at the application level. This removes a lot of friction from the process and enables you to focus on the relationship.
Similarly, Customer Success teams want to track usage to identify drop-off and better predict churn. They also might want to build a scalable framework of actions that ensures CS employees are managing and tracking the customer properly.
Sales operations needs to see data in real-time to more accurately forecast. APIs can provide them with a quantitative way to track success, number of trials, and churn.
For engineering teams, the use case might be around testing and measuring internal APIs, which are rapidly becoming extremely important with the proliferation of micro-services over the last few years.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, APIs make it easier to “integrate and connect people, places, systems, data, and algorithms, create new user experiences, share data and information, authenticate people and things, enable transactions and algorithms, leverage third-party algorithms, and create new product/services and business models.”
If you’re lost, Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong, one of the fastest growing open source projects, described a time when he was trying to explain APIs to his mother and likened them to the four circles protruding from a Lego piece that connect to other pieces in the pile. It’s that connection that allows the pieces to ‘communicate’ with the one another and take on a slightly different shape.
Hope this short post was insightful. Let us know how you’re using APIs today!
And if you want to learn more about how Mergeable makes this easy for non-technical teams, you can request a demo here: http://mergeable.io/request-a-demo/
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