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

Avoiding gameable metrics

Gameable metrics are metrics that can be artificially manipulated, or gamed, to achieve a desired outcome. For example, if a metric is being used to track the success of an API product and that metric can be easily influenced by the actions of the team, it may be a gameable metric.

To avoid setting gameable metrics for an API product, it’s important to choose metrics that are objective and difficult to manipulate. Here are some tips for avoiding gameable metrics:

  • Use multiple metrics to track the success of the API product. This can help to ensure that the success of the product is not being measured by just one potentially gameable metric. Make sure the metrics you choose are tied to the overall goals and objectives of the API product. This will help to ensure that the metrics are measuring something that is important and relevant to the success of the product.
  • Choose metrics that are based on objective data. For example, instead of...