It’s a fundamental query to ponder before initiating any development endeavor. If your aim is to craft APIs that deliver genuine value to your customers, embracing product-centric thinking is paramount. Implementing strategic changes enables you to develop APIs with foresight, ensuring alignment of every team with overarching business objectives.
In a recent episode of the API Intersection Podcast, Jason Harmon (Stoplight CTO) and Brian Otten (Axway VP of Digital Transformation Catalysts for North America) explored the concept of product thinking and the creation of APIs grounded in a shared understanding of value. As such, we’ve decided to delve deeper into this topic.
Crafting an API strategy fosters the harmonization of technology and business units around organizational goals. This alignment ensures collaborative efforts across teams to optimize the value derived from each API developed by your organization. Moreover, it guarantees the creation of solutions that hold significance for your customers. During the podcast, Brian recounted an interaction with a major energy company, where the team expressed:
Our dilemma lies in the multitude of teams creating APIs, each employing varied methodologies. When we attempt to integrate these APIs across the organization or enterprise, the diversity in approaches complicates the process of consolidating them into something beneficial. Consequently, this results in time-consuming efforts, which translate to incurred costs.
As a component of your API strategy, we advocate for treating your APIs as products. This entails designing APIs to address specific pain points experienced by consumers and articulating the value proposition of each API before embarking on development. Establishing a value proposition informs your API design and facilitates the creation of APIs catering to diverse consumer needs.
Amancio Bouza recently penned an insightful piece on his blog addressing precisely this inquiry — “How to Craft the Value Proposition for an API Product in 5 Simple Steps.” In the blog post, he elucidates the utilization of a Value Proposition Interface Canvas (VPI Canvas) to elucidate how you are generating and delivering value to customers through your API.
Prior to defining the value proposition, however, it’s imperative to acknowledge that the API product lifecycle encompasses not one, but three distinct cycles:
Business operations: This phase involves conceptualizing ideas, innovations, and applications for the API. It also entails determining the functionality and features necessary to satisfy customers.
DevOps: This operational process aims to expedite the development of APIs or applications, predominantly through automation. The objective is to ensure consistent and continuous delivery of releases and updates.
Product operations: Often overlooked in many organizations, product operations represents the juncture where business product professionals and technology product experts collaborate to hash out the intricacies of the API. Here, the focus lies on determining the value proposition and addressing the problems it aims to resolve.
So, how can you foster product-centric thinking across your organization? An increasing number of organizations have opted to onboard an API product manager.
The emergence of the API product manager role is increasingly noticeable, with many organizations now incorporating this title into their API development processes. Jason elaborated on this trend during the podcast:
We’ve observed the proliferation of API product manager roles in a manner that wasn’t as prevalent even just two years ago. We’ve also seen instances where the practice of designing an API from scratch is being led by product managers, despite their lack of technical background. However, the established frameworks ensure that they can conceptualize and design something, meet the required standards, and provide a foundation for the team to refine further.
The API product manager has become a vital necessity for many companies, but what precisely do they entail? In essence, they oversee the design, development, and deployment of an organization’s APIs, ensuring that these APIs deliver value to all stakeholders.
This role demands a multifaceted skill set, encompassing proficiency in API metrics, an empathetic understanding of developers, and insight into stakeholder needs.
API stakeholders encompass four primary groups: providers, customers, consumers, and end-users. The API product manager collaborates with these stakeholders to ensure that the API delivers value across the board, a task that entails a myriad of responsibilities and duties.
The role of the API product manager is pivotal in crafting top-notch, valuable APIs. However, if you lack one, you may still accomplish similar objectives through alternative API collaboration models, including:
These collaborative frameworks offer a pathway to developing reliable and high-performing APIs. However, in the absence of an API product manager, fostering a product-oriented mindset within your teams can prove challenging. To cultivate a product mindset, consider:
Establishing your API as a premier product transcends any singular job title or toolset. It necessitates the cultivation of a mindset and a suite of practices over time. Once you’ve delineated your strategy for integrating product thinking and an API product strategy, the next step is to define your API objectives.
To foster a product-centric approach, it’s imperative to define precise objectives for each API. An article by Axway elaborates on the significance of setting clear objectives: “The most effective objectives are those aligned with customer interactions with your company and product. By crafting well-defined objectives, your roadmap encompasses a series of customer-centric initiatives rather than merely a collection of feature requests.”
What are the precise goals for an API? The specifics differ depending on the organization. Generally, companies establish business goals centered on API adoption, engagement, and retention.
Adoption — Following the API’s launch, the emphasis typically shifts to driving adoption and monitoring consumer growth. The focus lies in expanding the API’s user base.
Engagement — With a growing number of API users, attention can turn to fostering engagement and incentivizing increased API usage.
Retention — To ensure continued API usage, objectives aimed at promoting product retention are crucial.
It’s really hard retrospectively to do that [converging on the common definition of value] if you haven’t thought about that up front.
In teams where all members possess identical technical roles, objectives typically revolve around technical enhancements, such as optimizing latency or managing documentation. Conversely, product-centric teams integrate diverse functional viewpoints and concentrate on collective aims and goals aligned with desired outcomes, rather than specific methodologies.
In the podcast, Brian and Jason delve into the concept of structuring tech teams around products rather than systems. Brian elaborated, stating, ‘We’re witnessing a shift towards organizations adopting a product-oriented approach. For instance, one pharmaceutical company we collaborated with was already contemplating reorganizing their technology teams along product lines rather than systems.’
He further explained, ‘Previously, teams might have been siloed as the SAP team, responsible for managing specific back-end functions and master data. However, now they’re transitioning to owning broader capabilities, such as business partner data, vendor data, customer data, orders, invoices, and the like. This shift allows them to better understand their role and assume greater accountability and ownership.’
Aligning all teams — be it business, vendor, partner, or engineering teams — around products is imperative. Instead of operating in isolation and focusing solely on systems, fostering cross-functional collaboration and cultivating robust relationships among these teams are essential steps towards building consistent APIs. Leveraging appropriate tools can facilitate this endeavor.
Facilitating product-oriented thinking and aligning teams towards shared business objectives becomes significantly streamlined with API tools engineered for collaborative workflows. For instance, Stoplight offers a platform that brings stakeholders together seamlessly, enabling real-time collaboration on API design and development. This platform empowers API program leaders, team members, and stakeholders to engage in collaborative efforts, whether in real-time or asynchronously, from any location. Elevate your APIs to the status of fully-fledged products for stakeholders through interactive API design solutions tailored to their needs.
Interested in discovering more? Explore our demo. And don’t miss out on tuning in to the API Intersection Podcast that served as the inspiration for this blog post!