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

Establishing counter metrics

Metrics-based product development is one of the best things to happen in the software age. Metrics let us define what success looks like and then track our progress until we’ve definitely reached our goals.

Metrics for product development come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and each one has a different purpose. It is natural to pay the greatest amount of attention to the metrics that show how successful a product is. We use these success metrics or goal metrics to decide which features and improvements to add to our products first. They are quantitative measures of what we think success looks like, based on data. This makes it easy to measure success. They are the main way we know we are going in the right direction, and they are essential in measuring our operational efficiency.

For a given product, we might have a lot of metrics that show how well it’s doing, or we might decide to focus on a single North Star metric for the...