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