Author: Lawrence Ebringer

Business analytics is the practice of using data and statistical analysis to help businesses make better decisions. This can involve analyzing data to identify trends, patterns, and relationships and using that information to help businesses make better decisions about their operations, marketing, and strategy.

The value of Business Analytics is clear. Data-driven decisions can help businesses measure their performance, understand their customers, and, most importantly, drive growth. With an increasing number of businesses relying on APIs as their de facto digital supply chain, there is even more data out there for enterprises to measure and analyze. Yet many are missing out by not making the most of their API business analytics or even using them at all.

You don’t need to be a data science expert to make use of platform analytics to gain better insights into your business. From Google Analytics to deep-dive data analytics for your APIs, big data is your friend when it comes to understanding your company. The right analytics platform can open up your data in a user-friendly way that empowers you to fuel better-informed business decisions based on your performance, customer data, and analytics.

What Is an Analytics Platform?

An analytics platform is a platform that delivers a wide range of business analytics tools and functions to enable users to visualize and interact with the data. Platform analytics enables businesses to make more informed decisions underpinned by sound data science and actionable insights.

Developer experience. If you provide APIs or API-first products, you likely hear that term a lot. After all, you need developers for an API to succeed — and if they don’t have a great experience, they’ll move on.

What Is Developer Experience?

Developer Experience (DevEx or DX) is an extension of user experience (UX) where the focus is on users impacted by the technical side of things — for example, tooling, languages, and workflows. But DevEx is far more than “UX for developers:” it means ensuring that developers can easily understand and leverage an API for their own applications and use cases. Great DevEx happens when you communicate with your developer users, understanding and meeting their needs directly. If you can win over developers, you can build a large and thriving ecosystem around your products.

Developer experience. If you provide APIs or API-first products, you likely hear that term a lot. After all, you need developers for an API to succeed — and if they don’t have a great experience, they’ll move on.

What Is Developer Experience?

Developer Experience (DevEx or DX) is an extension of user experience (UX) where the focus is on users impacted by the technical side of things — for example, tooling, languages, and workflows. But DevEx is far more than “UX for developers”: it means ensuring that developers can easily understand and leverage an API for their own applications and use cases. Great DevEx happens when you communicate with your developer users, understanding and meeting their needs directly. If you can win over developers, you can build a large and thriving ecosystem around your products.

It’s a prudent business practice to only focus on your core features when getting to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Microservices architectures allow you to outsource non-differentiated pieces of your solution to third-party providers; Use someone else for user management, billing, and account management.

At first blush, it might seem attractive to develop your own API analytics solution, perhaps by building on top of a web analytics tool like Amplitude, MixPanel, or Segment. But once you peel back the onion you’ll soon realize that you’ll be unnecessarily crippling your solution through upload limits, de minimis dimensional support, and flawed visualization.

As an API product manager, you want your API to have a great developer experience. This means that developers can get up and running quickly, they get consistent behavior from your API, it’s easy for them to troubleshoot any errors they encounter, and your API makes it easy for them to address their business needs.

Tracking your APIs is an important part of understanding how well they perform, which leads most organizations to build out their own internal API tracking systems. While this approach can work out for some organizations, it is much more common for organizations to track metrics incorrectly. Tracking the wrong metrics leads to an incorrect understanding of your API.