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

Part 1:The API Landscape

Before diving into the details of what API products are and how to build them, you will need to first look at the market landscape of API products to understand the products and services that exist in this space.

The history of the web-based APIs we know today can be traced back to the late 1990s when Salesforce launched a web-based sales automation tool. This application marks the beginning of the Software as a Service (SaaS) revolution. The World Wide Web has strengthened the underlying infrastructure that enables this newly discovered way of delivering software. Before the World Wide Web and the internet, APIs existed. Still, they were a form of proprietary protocol that supported small, distributed computer networks that spanned a limited area most of the time. The purpose of APIs in the pre-internet and post-internet eras is the same. APIs allow API providers to provide services, so external systems can call API providers to take advantage of those...