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

Counter Metrics to Avoid Blind Spots

In Chapter 14, Keeping Metrics Honest, you learned about establishing metrics in clusters. When you try to establish a vast set of balanced metrics, it is possible that you create biases or blind spots that you may not be aware of. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to deal with biases and blind spots in the metrics you set up with the following strategies:

  • Establishing counter metrics
  • Avoiding gameable metrics
  • Avoiding cannibalizing metrics
  • Aligning incentives
  • Avoiding cognitive biases

By being aware of your subconscious biases and the gameability of metrics, you can be on the lookout for these when setting your metrics.