Building APIs That Developers Love: Feedback Collection Tips
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A presentation given by Anna Tsolakou & Gael Imperial, Amadeus at our 2023 Platform Summit, October 17-18, 2023
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Building APIs That Developers Love: Feedback Collection Tips
- 1. Anna Tsolakou Developer Advocate Gaël Imperial API Product Manager Building APIs that developers love Feedback collection tips developers.amadeus.com
- 3. Why feedback in the first place?
- 4. Product roadmap Missed aspects Market trends Innovation Why feedback is important
- 5. How to get valuable user feedback?
- 6. The path we all know: Customer Support Feedback • Preferred features • Pain points Challenges • Overwhelming • Feedback consolidation
- 8. _ Bugs reporting _ Feature requests _ Contributions API integration Open-source developer tools
- 9. Move to production Business aspects Monetization Interviews with top users
- 10. Feedback at the right place
- 11. End-to-end process _ API & Platform _ Innovation _ New API provider Hackathons
- 12. The voice of your community Live interactions Announceme nts Polls & surveys Collective feedback
- 13. What’s next?
- 14. Find the Impostors Impostors are feedback points that look great but make your product worse How to find them? • Focus on your product value proposition • Keep in mind your company mission
- 15. Use statistics The survivor bias gives more importance to highly reported feedback How to avoid? • What is the user trying to achieve?
- 16. Iterate _ Help your users grow _ Protect yourself against Impostors and Statistical Bias _ Control your costs
- 17. Are we done now?
- 18. Get back to users
- 20. Collect Prioritize Communicate _ Specific feedback type _ Developer community _ Come back to users _ Measure satisfaction _ Impostors _ Statistics _ Iteration Key takeaways
- 21. Thank you! Get in touch! /tsolakouanna /gaël-imperial developers.amadeus.co m
Editor's Notes
- Starting story We are going to tell you where to find feedback? How to sort them? And What you can do to make a difference? What to implement to get more precise feedback? Why usual priorisation method can be misleading? and how you can make a difference?
- Gael and I work at Amadeus, which is a tech leader in the travel industry. More specifically we work at Amadeus for Developers which is the open API program of Amadeus that connects developers to travel data and services. Gathering the developer feedback one of the top priorities for us, and here are few reasons why.
- So now let’s see why feedback is important! - With developer feedback you are able to know what your users expect and thanks to that, you can build a product that matches their expectations - Another reason is the fact that your users can see things that you cannot see from the inside, so you have the chance to learn some unseen aspects and perspectives of your product. - Also you get to know better the market. - and finally innovative ideas are being generated which can lead to new business opportunities.
- At this point we are going to see how you can get valuable user feedback
- The most straightforward way to get feedback is through the customer support channels. - With the customer support you get in touch with several willing to share with you their experiences and their struggles and what they need to succeed in their business. However this can be very challenging at the same time. - You might get overwhelmed by having to handle the customer needs and at the same time to consolidate all the feedback. - And then it might be challenging to evaluate the feedback as well. Does it affect only one of your users or it affects a larger scale of your customer base? So at this point we would like to show you several ways of how you can get more specific types of feedback. Again, the customer support is a really good way and at Amadeus for Developers we have learned through that. However, it gets very challenging and we believe there are many other ways you can explore.
- The first step of the journey is for developers to explore your documentation. They want to know what they can do with your API and how to use them. - you can have some emojis on your documentation for users to click on depending on their satisfaction - and a link to a feedback form to give more details if they want to
- The next step, is now for developers to integrate your API in their applications. At this point they want to build and test their application. At this point I would advise you, any developers tools or developer libraries you offer to make them open source. Not only developers might build a community around your OS technologies, but also they can give some valuable feedback on the integration. - For example, developers can open issues for bugs or improvements they want to see - And also developers would be willing to even make contributions to features that really matter to them.
- The last step involves the developers launching their application to the public. Now's a good time to reach out to your top users for feedback on the business aspects and how you can help them. Maybe your API is powerful from the technical point of view, but does it mean your customers can make profit out of it? So, when planning to release an API next time, ask yourself, “How can this API bring value to the business of my customers”
- Sometimes developers might place feedback in the wrong place. For example in the documentation feedback form they might add feedback about the SDKs, or on the SDKs feedback on the APIs. - Give the clear pathways for the users. For example if they create an issue on Github, create some issue , or use feedback forms with targeted questions to gather specific insights directly.
- Now if you want to get feedback on your platform or even get new ideas, hackathons is the way to go. - Hundreds of users with different profiles will play with your APIs and you can see how they feel from the beginning that they register to your platform, until the end that they have built a solution. - Also you can see how your platform behaves when there is a lot of traffic at the same time. - Finally, all the solutions will inspire you for new ideas. - And definitely hackathons can be extremely useful at early stages API companies that are still working on the API roadmap and platform.
- Not only you can get feedback with real-time interactions, polls and surveys. But you can also get feedback in a more collective way, by seeing how your users engage with each other and how they react to a feedback mentioned in the community.
- You can not solve all the feedback
- Impostors are feedback that looks good at first sight but end up making your product worse. The easier one to see are: - Adding a field in reply which need a call to an external source and suddenly your API response time is 5 s - Adding some query parameter to an existing end-point and suddenly the API is very hard to use because all this parameter are not working well together But it can also be more vicious. While it make sense for the user it can be cannibalizing one of your other product or simply ruin your business model. How can you spot an impostor? Focus on your product value proposition Keep in mind your company mission If you need to bend too much your value, then they are impostors : New product Partnership New company Bad idea
- Do you know Abraham Wald? During WW2, bomber plane were a huge tactical advantage in battle and the alliance invested a lot in research to improve their survivability on the battlefield. The common approach was to look at the damage on all the planes and apply reinforcement on the part that were the most hit. Do you have an idea of how much of an improvement in survivability it brought? None, nada, 0
- Start with a guide to get info on the interest and than do something bigger Guide Tutorial Work around
- This is it! Are we really done? All this feedbacks were so overwhelming we forget the main point. We are doing this for the user, to engage the community,…
- Opportunity to talk an advertise about your product Tool and how to communicate From PM point of view, it important to come back to the user because: Opportunity to promote the company and the API If the feedback is big -> more communication and attract new people From DevRel, the work is not completed with a better API We need to build the material to support the communication and promotion Even if it’s not a major release we still need to make everything work and easy to use (JAVA SDK update even for 1 field)
- Another important aspect of getting back to the user is measuring the satisfaction: As PM I want to be sure the feedback we solved has really made my API better: Checking the volume of transaction Checking the number of users As DevRel, it’s important to know the fix was worth it: ---------------------------------- (good) reduce customer support by X% when we built tutorials based on repetitive questions of the users (bad) Or if we offer a new SDK, is it being used? To give you a real example we released mobile SDKs Was highly requested on hackathons but didn’t perform well Why? reviewing the user agents in our logs not knowledge of the languages in our team
- Keep in mind that developer feedback can shape your API. Pay attention on how you gather it and how you evaluate and your users will definitely appreciate it.