We’ve all heard stories about the audacious workarounds that developers come up with to extract unsupported functionality from a platform or its APIs. Maybe the workaround came to light because of a sudden spike in traffic on your API infrastructure, or when updates broke an existing third-party integration. You could try to discourage developers from getting creative with your APIs–or you could embrace workarounds as an essential part of the API design process. Workarounds demonstrate the true needs and use cases of your API consumers, and they might even give you a few ideas on how to solve a feature gap. In this talk, you’ll learn how you can react better and be proactive about gathering this valuable feedback, and how to incorporate it into your API design process.

1. Hacks, Workarounds,
and Creative Solutions
How unsupported use cases reveal the true needs of your
API consumers
PRESENTER
Karen White
@karen_pwhite
Event
Nordic Austin API Summit
DATE
May 15, 2019

2. Karen White
Developer Advocate
BigCommerce
@karen_pwhite

3. What is a
Workaround?

4. The Texas Exit

5. (Class C Misdemeanor)
The Texas Exit

6. A workaround is
trying to tell you
something.

7. For Product Teams
● No visibility into solutions
● Narrow view of developer use
cases
For Developers
● Temporary fix
● Fragile
● Difficult to scale
● Difficult to onboard
What’s Wrong with Workarounds?

8. Case Study:
BigCommerce
Checkout

9. Developers
will find a way
(whether you give
them one or not)

10. Break the
Workaround
Cycle End Users have an
unmet need
Developers find a
solution to meet
that need
API contract doesn’t
account for solution

11. Creating the Happy Path
Expose
Public
API
Provide
SDK
Native
Feature
consumes
same API

12. Custom
Checkout,
Built with
Checkout SDK
Credit: Mustache Republic

13. Gathering Feedback
Provide
SDK
Monitor online
forums
Talk with other
internal teams
Meet 1:1 with
active community
members

14. Don’t Get Too Comfortable with a Workaround

15. Be sure unmet needs that
have workarounds don’t
take a backseat when
making roadmap decisions.

16. Developers need to be
asked...because they won’t
necessarily tell you.
● What would you like a cleaner solution for?
● What workflows could be more efficient?

17. Summary
Listen to your
developer
community
Be sure your product
team is looking at
workarounds in the
right way
Provide the Happy
Path

18. Thank you.
@karen_pwhite