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

API maturity

API governance is utilized to drive consistency and trust through the development of APIs, but most of the work that teams do on API governance prior to APIs being published is completely hidden from the end customer. Like all great designs, the customers only experience a polished product and don’t notice the thoughtful details in the background that make it all possible.

Although the internal stages of the API life cycle are hidden from the customer, what is visible to the customer is API maturity. API maturity is a label that companies give to their APIs to set expectations with the customer regarding supportability, versioning, and backward compatibility, among others.

The following diagram illustrates the different levels of maturity that an API goes through as it gets developed and is released to customers:

Figure 3.3 – API maturity levels

Figure 3.3 – API maturity levels

Companies building commercial APIs, such as eBay, Twilio, Okta, Stripe, and...