We interviewed the product managers at a number of the larger API-first companies that are based in San Francisco. The companies are all publicly traded, have TTM revenue of more than $100M and are in the fields of billing, security, communications and workflow automation. The PMs were asked what were their favorite tools and what API metrics they cared most about.
When you set out to build your first API, it can very well be that you are either overwhelmed or forget essential points. The ecosystem for API tools is vast, and it’s vital to get the right tool for every phase of your project. In this article, we will go through the different phases an API project usually has. For every phase, I will list the significant points and tools that help there.
For any API-first company, implementing the right API analytics platform is critical for tracking the utilization of your APIs and to discover any performance or functional issues that may be impacting customers. There are a variety of open-source projects you can leverage to build a complete API analytics platform. Before jumping into building an API analytics solution yourself, you should first list out your requirements and use cases.
Making your company successful hinges on your customers being able to stand your product up, and gain value from it. When you’re using inbound marketing to drive customer acquisition, email doesn’t have to be relegated to second-class citizen status. We argue that email is one of the most powerful channels of communication between B2B companies and their customers.
Kong is a highly recommended API Gateway for any team looking for a reliable and scalable way to provide APIs. Compared to more traditional players like Apigee and Mulesoft, Kong follows an open-core model and is highly modular. To best optimize your API performance and understand what changes are needed to recoup your investment, it’s recommend to set up API monitoring and analytics.
At Moesif, we primarily market to developers and other technical audiences like product managers and developer relations teams looking to make their own developer platform successful. Getting developers to adopt your API or tool is hard and requires heavy investment in experimentation and measurement in order to achieve the results you’re looking for. At the same time, much of the online advice you hear for B2C or B2B marketing simply won’t work when marketing to developers.
One of our API-first brethren in San Francisco recently shared with us how they built their synthetic testing system to monitor uptime and latency. It was a large undertaking involving a huge Redshift warehouse, Datadog and many man months of engineering effort. At the end of it, they could measure latency’s completeness, whether it was functionally correct and, when it moved out of bounds, alert CSM/engineering teams.
If your business model involves selling to developers, you probably have already realized that much of the traditional processes and metrics applicable to traditional enterprise sales or consumer marketing don’t work. Specifically, selling to developers usually means attracting them to your platform and helping them succeed in building something, whether that’s a new app, integration, or automating an internal process.
In today’s unprecedented economic downturn, it’s more difficult than ever to find and close new customers. The onus is now on maintaining existing customers as productive users of your product. By closely monitoring API metrics, Customer Success Management (CSM) teams can get an early warning on those that are at risk of churning, and rectify things before it’s too late.
As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.
