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

Managing an API as a product

An API as a product involves treating the API as a standalone product that is marketed, sold, and supported for customer use. This includes tasks such as defining the API’s value proposition, creating documentation and tutorials, setting the pricing and usage limits, monitoring the usage and performance, and responding to customer feedback and support requests. It also involves continuously updating and improving the API based on customer feedback and market trends to ensure it remains valuable to customers. In other words, managing an API as a product is similar to managing any other product, but with a focus on the specific needs and considerations of an API.

Organizations that already have APIs can transition to managing them as products by implementing the following steps:

  1. Define the value proposition of the API: Understand the unique value that the API provides to customers and how it addresses specific business needs or solves specific...