Ten tips for Product Managers to get confident with APIs

Perhaps only five years ago, most product managers had limited exposure to APIs. Today in contrast, Product Managers are regularly encountering APIs. Whether connecting digital experiences, driving ecosystems, or unleashing the power of AI, APIs now play a critical role in digital products and business strategy.

However, a quick look at product management discussion boards, and it’s evident that there is still some unease in working with APIs. 

The good news is that you don’t need to have a developer background, be able to code, or be highly technical to become familiar with APIs. Below are my ten tips for product managers to work effectively and confidently with APIs:

As a Product Manager, you should be focused on the API customer needs with a view of the functional qualities and requirements, you shouldn’t try to assume the role of API designer. 

Questions such as who is the API for, what are they trying to achieve, what is the job-to-be done, should form a key part of your discovery. From this you can generate your user stories, just as you would for any other product, with success criteria and clarity around the intent and action. 

One of the most effective ways I’ve been able to understand the API’s job-to-be-done and truly understand customer pain points, is by speaking directly with customers. There’s always so much quality feedback gathered when interviewing both API developer users and business users. 

Process mapping is a useful device in the product management toolkit and can be helpful to better understand API customer needs. Journey map or flow chart a customer process to identify how a potential API fits into a sequence or journey, to give it broader context. 

In my own experience, while mapping out customer processes and journeys, I have on occasion been surprised and delighted at the creative ways customers have used an API, and importantly, identified key opportunities where an API can deliver significant benefit to a customer process.

Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and try APIs out for yourself, and you don’t need to be able to code at all to do this. 

When I first started delving into the API space, getting hands on and learning to use an API was extremely valuable in gaining an understanding about how APIs look and behave, and in a small way, allowed me to begin to appreciate the developer experience. 

There are many API Developer Portals that have a try it out feature, Google APIs Explorer is a great example of this . Alternatively, you can download a testing app, like Postman, call some open access APIs and become familiar with how API requests and responses work. Youtube also has fantastic tutorials for beginners on how to use Postman, here’s an example. 

Get familiar with basic API design principles. As a Product Manager you don’t need to be an expert in API design principles. However, having a basic grasp of these concepts can help give extra depth in your discussions with API customers. 

There are many fantastic resources online that provide a summary of API design principles. I like this article because it defines key concepts in layman terms. This article summarises API design best practises, and this one goes in to a bit more detail around API design standards.  

Quality documentation is imperative for API products, as a Product Manager you should champion the need for excellent documentation as part of the delivery of API. 

This means you should understand what makes quality API documentation. This article is great as it reviews API documentation and has specific criteria on what should be included (e.g. authentication guide, code snippets, example responses, etc.).

As a Product Manager, I have found that interviewing our developer customers and hearing directly from them about what were the friction points in trying to connect with an API, allowed us to understand how we could improve our documentation to ease this process. Understanding what key elements should be included in API documentation will allow you to advocate for your customers.

Go-to-market planning is important for all products, APIs are no exception. Customers need to be able to discover your APIs. 

A key component of API go-to-market strategy is an API Developer Portal. A Developer Portal acts as a central hub for developers looking to integrate APIs into their applications.

A good API Developer Portal supports the developer experience, reducing integration effort, publishing and centralising API documentation and supporting resources needed to consume your APIs, ultimately driving better API adoption and integration. 

In addition to an API Developer Portal, you may also need to consider sales collateral to communicate and sell the benefits and value of your APIs from a business perspective, particularly for B2B APIs. 

While Developers are key customers of APIs, often people in other roles, such as Operations Managers, Product Managers or Partnership Managers, play critical roles in deciding whether to use your API. For these decision makers, you need to be able to clearly communicate the value of your API from a business perspective. 

Frictionless onboarding is critical to API product adoption. Developers need to connect to the API quickly. 

The time it takes a developer to first connect to an API, otherwise known as Time To Hello World or Time to First Call, will impact the success of your API. Postman’s 2022 State of The API survey highlighted that this was a key factor in customer decisions on whether to use an API. 

As a Product Manager you should strive for a frictionless onboarding experience. I like this article reviews top API onboarding experiences and highlights what characteristics need to be considered to provide a best in class onboarding experience.  

I’ve also found journey mapping the developer experience, by speaking directly with developer customers, a useful technique for identifying frustrating or time-consuming moments in onboarding. With this information we were then able to improve the developer onboarding experience and strive for an efficient and easy self-service end goal.

Take the time to understand essential API metrics. 

There’s API operational metrics, such as error rates, response times or requests per minute, or customer API usage/adoption. 

As a Product Manager, you should also measure your APIs from a business perspective. If you have direct monetization, revenue generated becomes an easy metric to measure. Other metrics could include new channel enablement, revenue or the transactions that have flowed through your APIs, the number of partners using your API and the value and impact of those partners to your business, and the value and impact of your APIs to your API consumers. 

This article is a great starting point as it summarises the 4 key API metric types.

Lastly; Don’t get intimidated into thinking because APIs are a technical product, that product management practices can’t be applied to them. 

You can leverage your existing product management toolbox, apply discovery and delivery practises and utilise design thinking when working with APIs.