This document discusses how to accelerate API innovation by focusing on people, processes, and technology. It recommends establishing baselines for delivery and outcomes metrics. For people, it emphasizes fostering a culture of continuous improvement and empowering developers' tools of choice. For processes, it recommends automation, continuous integration and delivery, and lightweight approval processes. For technology, it advocates for automated continuous deployment, unified insights platforms, and treating APIs as products. Case studies demonstrate benefits like 8 minute deployments and an 80% perceived productivity increase. The document concludes by noting the importance of understanding team context and starting improvements by ensuring developers feel supported and enabled.

1. Uptime, Mean-Time
And Ahead Of Your Time
How to Accelerate API Product Innovation

2. Let’s Get To Know Each Other!

3. Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

4. Why Accelerate API Innovation?

5. “Often, innovation arises not from inventing something new
so much as activating existing value in new ways. APIs can
facilitate this within an organization by making data and
functionality easy for internal developers to access and
reuse ...”
Source: Google Cloud

6. “[APIs] can also facilitate innovation by opening valuable
assets up to external innovators, whether they’re corporate
partners or independent developers.”
Source: Google Cloud

7. “65% of respondents said [that APIs generate revenue at
their company]. Of those … 43% said their APIs generate
more than a quarter of the business's total revenue. For a
handful of companies, APIs generated more than 75% of
total revenue.”
Source: Postman

8. Where Do You Start?

9. People. Processes. Technology.

10. But first, let’s establish a baseline.

11. What to Measure - Delivery
Source: DORA
Lead time for changes:
How long does it take to go
from code committed to code
successfully running in
production?
Time to restore service:
How long does it generally take
to restore service when a service
incident or a defect that impacts
users occurs?
Change failure rate:
What percentage of changes to
production or released to users
result in degraded service and
require remediation?
Deployment frequency:
How often does your organization
deploy code to production or
release it to end users?
Velocity
Stability

16. What to Measure - Outcomes
Source: DORA & Opsera
Customer Satisfaction:
Are your customers
and end users seeing
the value from
accelerated delivery?
● NPS Scores
● G2 and Reviews
● Testimonials
Employee Satisfaction:
Are developers more
satisfied with their job?
Do they feel more
enabled?
● Surveys
● Glassdoor
● Social Media
Market Share:
Are you creating more
opportunities for
revenue and investment?
● Pipeline
● Investment
● Partnerships

17. Where Do APIs Fit?

18. Software DevOps Lifecycle

19. Source: Stoplight

20. …So How Do We Do It?

21. People

22. Key Capabilities
Foster a Culture of
Continuous Improvement
Focus on Team
Outcomes, Not
Developer Productivity
Empower Developers’
Tools of Choice
High Collaboration and
Communication

23. “When teams decide which tools they use, it
contributes to software delivery performance, and
in-turn, to organizational performance.”
Source: Accelerate

24. Processes

25. Key Capabilities
Continuous Integration
and Continuous Delivery
Automation and
Infrastructure as Code
Integrated Testing and
Security
Immediate Feedback

26. “Teams that reported no approval process or used peer
review achieved higher software delivery
performance…teams that required approval by an
external body achieved lower performance.”
Source: Accelerate

27. “...use a lightweight change approval process based on
peer review, such as pair programming or intra-team
code review, combined with a deployment pipeline to
detect and reject bad changes.”
Source: Accelerate

28. Technology

29. Key Capabilities
Automated Continuous
Deployment and
Release Orchestration
Unified Insights
Platform Engineering,
Management, and
Toolchains
Treat APIs as Products,
not just Technology

30. Source: Stoplight

31. “[High Performing] Teams can deploy to production (or
to end users) on demand, throughout the software
delivery lifecycle.”
Source: Accelerate

32. Source: Armory

33. ● Lead Time for Changes: 8 minutes
○ New features, enhancements, fixes, and innovations
can be deployed in as little as 8 minutes!
● Change Failure Rate: 4.5%
● Deployment Frequency: ~4.3 Deployments per Day
● Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): < 2 Minutes
● Internal + External NPS Scores: High Performing
Case Study - Continuous Deployment

34. ● Increased developer collaboration, satisfaction, and
agility
● Productivity gains with the ability to build a holistic
and integrated DevOps pipeline in 30 minutes versus
2.5 hours
● All of this led to a perceived 80% increase in
productivity from the team
Case Study - DevOps Enablement, Unified
Insights + Tools of Choice
Non-Profit
Healthcare

35. Source: DORA

36. What’s Next?

37. “For a long time, DORA has taken into consideration that
effects depend on broader team context. We believe it’s
important to understand a team’s characteristics
(processes, strengths, constraints, and goals), and the
environment in which the work takes place.”
Source: State of DevOps Report 2022

38. People. Processes. Technology.

39. Identify where you are (and aren’t)
delivering APIs:
● Quickly
● Collaboratively
● Reliably
● Securely
● Continuously

40. Start with your teams.

41. Are Your Developers:
● Feeling Supported & Enabled
● Using Tools They Love
● Seeing Their Impact
● Engaging All the Way Through
from Design to Production

42. Suggested Reading

43. Anna Daugherty
Director of Product Marketing
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-daugherty/

44. Artwork By:
NI WAYAN EKA JAYANTI
https://link.yasadesign.com/