Your API Deserves More Respect: Make It A Product Andrew Seward, Technical Product Manager, Esendex Your API is a product in its own right - it has its own customer base, its own target market, customer journeys, interface considerations, profit margins, features, bugs, strengths and weaknesses. That idea is an easy sell for most of us here, but how do you get your whole company on board, particularly when many of your colleagues haven't heard of APIs before? I will share my experience of changing how Esendex thinks about and approaches its API - where we were with our API and how we went about raising it to be our main product. What worked, what didn't, what problems we encountered, how we overcame them and what we're still trying to figure out. We also want to hear from you and your experiences so we can all benefit from the conclusions you've drawn.

1. Your API deserves more respect
Make it a Product!

2. Today we will cover
● Brief introduction
● Your API is a Product
○ Why that matters
● Treating your API as a product
● Getting everyone on board
● Discussion

4. Features
Bugs
Customers
Things that are great
YOUR API IS A PRODUCT
Quirks Customer journeys
Things that suck
Packaging
Instructions
People who love it
People who don’t love it

5. Does your API have
● A target audience?
● A marketing strategy?
● A sales strategy?
● A development plan?
● A support process?

6. Your users don’t want an
API
They want a product that solves their problem

7. Why don’t we already
treat all APIs as
Products?

8. A Mars bar

9. An API
?

11. How do we talk about our
APIs?

12. Did you mention any of these things
● REST
● How great it works with programming
language X
● How it’s secured (API keys, OAuth, Basic
auth, etc.)

13. Talk about what you can
do with it and why
Not how it works

14. Less of this

15. More of this

16. APIs as products
When talking about your API…
Talk about these first:
● What it does
● How customers can benefit from it
● How easy it is to use
Talk about these later:
● How does what it does
● How you integrate with it
● How RESTful it is
● How well it works with ELK stacks and Hadoop clusters,
and C#, Java, PHP, Node, Scala, Ruby, Python, Perl, Lisp, Ada, Swift...

17. Getting the team on board

18. API Training

19. Make sure everybody understands
● What your product is
● Who uses it
● How they benefit
● How it performs
● How we talk about it

20. Change how you talk
about your API
to change how you think about it

21. Today we covered
● Brief introduction
● Your API is a Product
○ Why that matters
● Treating your API as a product
● Getting everyone on board

22. Discuss