Product APIs: How Product Managers Can Leverage Them for Business Success

Thaisa Fernandes
PM101
Published in
3 min readMar 20, 2023

Product APIs have revolutionized the way businesses interact with their customers and the market. As a product manager, understanding and leveraging these APIs can be instrumental in achieving business success. In this blog post, we will dive deeper into how product managers can use product APIs to enhance their products and services.

First things First:

Product managers can integrate their products with third-party services using product APIs. For instance, an e-commerce platform may use a payment processing API to enable customers to complete transactions on their website.

This allows customers to use their preferred payment method, making the transaction process more convenient and streamlined. Moreover, integrating with third-party services helps businesses to offer complementary services to their customers, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Build Custom Integrations

Product managers can build custom integrations with other products or services using product APIs. For example, a project management tool may use a time-tracking API to build a custom integration with a time-tracking app. This not only enhances the user experience but also helps businesses to improve productivity and efficiency.

Collect Data

Product managers can use product APIs to collect data about their own products or competitors’ products. This data can be used to inform product decisions and improve the user experience. For example, a business can use data from product APIs to identify the most popular products or features and make informed decisions about product development and marketing strategies.

Create New Products

Product managers can use product APIs to create entirely new products. For example, a social media platform may use a location-based API to build a new feature that allows users to find and connect with others in their area. This not only enhances the user experience but also helps businesses to expand their product offerings and reach new markets.

Key Tips:

When working with product APIs, product managers need to consider a few key tips. They need to identify the business need for creating APIs and prioritize the planning and development of APIs that align with the organization’s goals and revenue targets. They should also evaluate user adoption based on qualitative feedback and key metrics such as conversion rate, retention, request volume, and latency.

Product managers should also have a product strategy in place to determine which APIs to build first in order to expose the most critical functionality as soon as possible. Finally, product managers should consider how having an API can enable professional services revenue.

In summary:

Product APIs can be instrumental in achieving business success. Product managers can leverage APIs to integrate with third-party services, build custom integrations, collect data, and create new products. It is crucial to prioritize planning and development based on revenue targets and user adoption metrics, have a product strategy in place, and consider how having an API can enable professional services revenue.

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Thaisa Fernandes
PM101
Editor for

Program Management & Product Management | Podcast Host | Co-Author | PSPO, PMP, PSM Certified 🌈🌱