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 proposal

In a small organization, the API team can usually build APIs independently, but in most larger organizations, an API governance team will approve any APIs being built in the organization. Before you start building an API, you must put together a product specification document that talks about what the API is required to do. This is a simple document that maps out the API workflow and narrates the story of why this API needs to be built.

This API proposal document should map out the workflow of the API, along with various user stories. User stories are written in the format shown in the following figure:

Figure 4.2 – User story format

Figure 4.2 – User story format

This format is widely used across all types of products to the goals that need to be achieved by it and communicate the actions that need to be taken in the process.

For example, if you propose that your team builds a shipment tracking API for an e-commerce company, you can start to imagine user...