Book Image

API Analytics for Product Managers

By : Deepa Goyal
Book Image

API Analytics for Product Managers

By: Deepa Goyal

Overview of this book

APIs are crucial in the modern market as they allow faster innovation. But have you ever considered your APIs as products for revenue generation? API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development. Of course, it's not all about the product—as any good product manager knows; you need to understand your customers’ needs, expectations, and satisfaction too. Once you've gathered your data, you’ll need to be able to derive actionable insights from it. This is where the book covers the advanced concepts of leading and lagging metrics, removing bias from the metric-setting process, and bringing metrics together to establish long- and short-term goals. By the end of this book, you'll be perfectly placed to apply product management methodologies to the building and scaling of revenue-generating APIs.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
21
The API Analytics Cheat Sheet

Instrumenting support mechanisms

As you learned in Chapter 6, Support Models for API Products, support is a crucial aspect of customer experience. Making sure customers can find support channels when they need them can take many forms across various components of the API experience.

Live chat support is a great way to let customers reach out for help as they go through the products and evaluate them, but this can often be resource intensive. Products such as Intercom have innovated significantly in creating messaging experiences that find the balance between resource-intensive support and self-help for customers.

Oftentimes, developers will have questions about your APIs that are not clearly addressed in the documentation, or if they run into complicated scenarios during the integration process, they might need support. Tools such as Zendesk enable you to build support flows while allowing customers to choose their preferred channel of communication.

Direct support channels...