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

The API product life cycle

In Chapter 2, you learned about the product life cycle, where you take product ideas from discovery, inception, growth, maturity, and decline. When you apply that concept to APIs-as-products, you get an API product life cycle. APIs are developed in an iterative way, with features focused on the first set of customers who will use them. The best way to learn about customers is to get them to engage, and most of the time, API development teams will do just that.

At first, like any other product, there might just be an idea for building an API. This is a good time to put together an API proposal to evaluate the use cases that the prospective API could serve in order to establish the features of the first iteration of the API.

An API goes through six phases in its life cycle, from the time of inception to the state of being a generally available product ready for all customers to use and trust. Once an API has been published, it must be maintained so that...