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Doing the API work
Identify individual API opportunities that align with organizational strategy and business priorities. Collaborate with stakeholders to document API roadmaps and ensure alignment with business goals.
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API Consumer Experience
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Entry criteria
- Business goals are defined.
- Market research identifies API opportunities.
- Stakeholders approve strategy discussions.
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Exit criteria
- Individual API opportunities are identified and documented.
- The API meets a clear business need and is reusable for multiple API-consumers.
- API is designed for hiding backend data models and discrepancies.
- Value proposition is validated with key stakeholders.
- API consumer segments (internal and external) are identified.
- High-level roadmaps for API development are established.
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Enabling the API work
- Provide guidelines and templates for creating API business models, value propositions, and roadmaps.
Developer portal or documentation site UI design. Usability and graphics are both important.
Use company branding and content creation guidelines. But remember, your audience is much more technical than the average customer.
Can all your API consumers access all APIs?
Depending on developer portal capabilities and API -specific configuration developers can subscribe access to APIs with
- self-service or
- self-service with approval workflow
Content and communication guidelines
All human readable API documentation pages should be created automatically from API productization and OpenAPI documents. Masters should be stored and edited using version control, not just in the developer portal / documentation site.
Content, language, what information is shared, which channels and formats are used, etc. should be planned and optimized for your developer community.
Terms and conditions for using our APIs are important. Remember to create them together with business, legal and technology people. They need to address privacy and re-use, service levels and data ownership. Try to still keep them understandable.
You can create SDKs or provide code snippets. Remember that not all developers undestand cURL and that maintaining SDK will require work. Your Developer Portal may provide you a way to generate code snippets automatically from an Open API definition.
Presentations and demos help developers understand what they can use the API for. They may also need help in using the tools or figuring out the authentication. so make sure you address that, too.
Think how you are going to collect feedback and feature suggestions.
Some additional things that can impact developer experience:
- Marketing communication (ads, swag, press releases…)
- Monetization (API pricing and payments handling) can be used, if your API business model requires it and your own or your API management platform supports it natively or by connecting to payment gateways.
- Customer stories (testimonials, interviews etc.)
- Release notes/change logs
- Plugins and ready-made integrations
Choose your identities carefully
Pay a few moments of attention to how your API Consuming applications and developers need to authenticate to your APIs and your developer portal. Your priority maybe to make it very easy, but remember to make it secure enough.
