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

APIs in the digital value chain

The API team should be viewed as a refinery that processes raw materials from backend systems into API products, which provides developers with clean, well-organized ways to interact with the data. The diagram in Figure 4.1 represents the fundamental tasks of the API team. Incorporating a mature API product mindset influences the entire digital value chain, as depicted in the diagram. Care needs to be taken when building APIs so that end users have consistent access to record systems and other backend data:

Figure 4.1 – APIs in the digital value chain

Figure 4.1 – APIs in the digital value chain

This chain points out the primary users of the API: our Developer and Customers – the end users of the application. The experience of both these types of users is influenced by our API Development Team.

Developers are often concerned with the ease of use, reliability, robustness, and scalability of APIs so that they feel confident when using them to build their...