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

Defining product metrics

Product metrics are used to figure out how well a product is doing by measuring different parts of the customer journey and comparing them to the product strategy. Product metrics enable you to identify opportunities for product development, establish a baseline, and evaluate results as you make changes to the overall product experience. To accomplish this, product metrics measure various aspects of the customer journey, including discovery, engagement, activation, acquisition, retention, and experience.

You can use the developer journey you learned about in Chapter 5, Growth for API Products, to map the steps of the developer journey to various metrics you can measure at each step as customers go through them. You can see this framework in the following figure:

Figure 11.1 – Product metrics interpreted from the developer journey

Figure 11.1 – Product metrics interpreted from the developer journey

As customers discover your APIs, there are a number of discoverability-related metrics you...