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

Leading with the API strategy

Designing and releasing APIs for long-term value at scale and continuously improving them to meet increasing customer needs are the hallmarks of an API product approach. In contrast, when APIs are treated as standalone initiatives or as parts of larger projects, they tend to be less effective in terms of their scope, durability, and accessibility.

Developing APIs with a product-oriented approach means treating them as such during the design phase. The ease with which an API can be utilized in the future depends on how well it is built to be consumed by developers. However, if the API is only intended to be used within the scope of a single project, its author may fail to take into account critical elements such as documentation, uniform design standards, versioning, security, and extensibility.

Instead, API designers that think like product developers will put future sustainability and extensibility first. The importance of this distinction should...