Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
API monetization is a great way to recoup your investment in your API programs. Without direct monetization, you’re dependent on other sources of capital to grow the program, such as other profit centers or venture capital.
If you’re not directly monetizing your APIs, you could be leaving money on the table. This can be especially true if you don’t have any limits in place and lean on the honor system.
When you’re providing APIs to your customers, you want to ensure they are getting value from them. At the same time, the best APIs are designed to be fully automated without requiring human intervention. This can leave your customers in the dark on whether your API is even being used by the organization and if you’re meeting any SLA obligations in your enterprise contracts.
Most API first companies have some sort of developer portal for customers to log into, manage API keys, and customize features. This area is a great way to also expose key metrics to your customers demonstrating how much value they are getting from your API. This can be as simple as a counter showing number of API transactions made within a billing period or provide additional metrics around what those transactions are. Each customer has different metrics they want to look at. Developers will want to look at access logs where as product and engineering leadership are more interested in usage and performance metrics. Finally, the finance department may need to look at billing usage for capacity and financial planning.
API Observability is a key component to properly execute APIOps Cycles and ensure your building something of value for your API users. If you’re not familiar with APIOps Cycles, take a look at this guide which provides an agile framework to quickly build APIs that are business-oriented and serve customer needs. API Observability itself is an evolution of traditional monitoring and born out of control systems theory.
Traditional monitoring focuses on tracking known unknowns. This means you already know what to measure like Request Per Second or Errors Per Second. While the metric value may be unknown beforehand, you already know what to measure or probe such as a counter to track requests into buckets. This makes it possible to report on the health of a system (like Red, Yellow, Green), but is a bad tool for troubleshooting engineering or business issues which usually require asking arbitrary questions.
Internal APIs are designed primarily to streamline software development and simplify systems and operational processes. These currently represent the vast majority of use cases.
Internal APIs are often overlooked since they are aimed at in-house developers. These types of APIs generally work with proprietary data specific to a company and its departments. Although this data must be protected, it must also be accessible to those who work with it. Internal APIs allow for exactly this kind of secure access, creating more efficient development cycles for their products.
APIs — the current “big thing” — offer the opportunity for modern organizations to unlock new and lucrative business models. The article below covers some tips on how to spin the API flywheel and leverage its possibilities.
In the API economy, a successful service can gain popularity and be utilized in ways unpredicted and often inconceivable by its original owners. The very flexible nature of the technology opens many doors, including business collaborations, reuse in third-party products, or even conquering hardware barriers by reaching a spectrum of devices.
With software products becoming just a bunch of micro-services and third-party APIs mashed together, it's more crucial than ever to get their structure in order.
GraphQL already did this at its inception by coming up with a whole specification that describes how APIs of its type should behave. In the RESTful API landscape, things were a bit more wild west. However, even if not all backend devs know it, there are a number of specifications for REST APIs as well.
TL;DR Talk to your users
Most people who write software for a living have one thing in common - they don’t want to be stuck supporting all of the software they've developed forever.
Since its release in 2015, GraphQL has become the alternative to REST. It gives frontend developers the flexibility they had craved for for so long.
Over are the days of begging backend developers for one-purpose-endpoints. Now a query can define all the data that is needed and request it in one go, cutting latency down considerably.
Today, countless engineering teams have leveraged API monitoring to track infrastructure health and report when services are down or unhealthy. There are a variety of API metrics that can be tracked that are aligned with engineering goals, such as uptime, average latency, requests per minute, and errors per minute.
However, these metrics are not aligned with the business goals of product owners and growth teams. This article goes through how to leverage API monitoring tools to further your business growth and product road map.
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
The New Year brings with it a multitude of good intentions, with many of us determined to improve our lives one way or another and to set aspirational goals so that we can better our current self. With the idea of New Year resolutions, this post is about some New Year’s resolutions that all API Product Managers should consider adopting to better their API product offering.
The climate is a hot issue, and weather forecasting technology is suddenly cool. The urgent need for innovative weather and environmental conditions forecasting solutions is obvious whether you believe in climate change or not.
In fact, the climate is not only the topic of discussion around the water cooler. There are businesses, entire industries in fact, where weather conditions have a direct impact on day-to-day business operations. Industries like logistics, aviation, competitive outdoor sports, public safety, mining, and agriculture (to name just a few) are directly impacted by the weather. For these industries, weather forecasting accuracy can mean the difference between ending a fiscal year in profit or loss.
The video for the talk I gave at the 2018 API Conference is now available.
I have talked about this a bit before, as well as shared the slides, but one of my main takeaways is that we are all (mostly) in the business of building products on a daily basis, whether we are coding or writing docs, tests, change requests, specifications, or designs. There is almost always an end product of our work, and the product decisions we make while building it has a direct impact on the end-users (people will have to read/amend your code, read your specifications, translate your designs, consume your APIs, etc.). With that in mind, it seems sensible that we look at what lessons we can take from the discipline of Product Management to help us make smart decisions in our day-to-day lives.