This deck was presented on Wednesday, September 14th 2016, to API World (https://apiworld2016.sched.org/). It was presented by Eric Caron, of Best Buy, and dives into some common lessons about offering a public API and describes easy solutions to better serve the business & community.

1. The Blessings and
Curses of Offering a Free
Public API
Lessons learned in the trenches managing
Best Buy’s external APIs
WELCOME TO

2. Ground Rules
Over the last 72 hours,
you’ve been hit over the
head with these terms.
Aside from this slide, the
first person to hear me say
each of these gets $5.
Microservices
DevOps
Agile
Cloud

3. Who Is This Guy?
Eric Caron
@ecaron
Sr. Product
Manager of APIs
at Best Buy
Ten years in startups before joining Best Buy. I like Node.js,
prefer Swagger and have written some truly awful APIs…

4. Best Buy launches Remix
According to Kevin Matheny, senior e-business architect for
Best Buy, "We've seen the first blushes of some really neat
mash-ups of the API's, very exciting." He also noted that
SXSW "is a great place for serendipity.”
Source: https://nerdery.com/mentions/16
2009

5. API Grows, Community Engages
Although Best Buy has an “interesting” couple of years, the
company continues to invest in the API. We see sites and
browser plugins appear that use the API, people
publishing their own SDKs, and a couple versions of the
site that make me very thankful for the talented designers I
now have on my team.
2010-2014

6. We Lost Touch
Somewhere along the way, our focus should have
expanded beyond “Get new users” to “Engage with
existing customers.” But it didn’t. So we were serving
hundreds of requests per second to a user base we no
longer knew.
2015

7. Hard to Run a Public API and Always Be Popular
“Twitter Handcuffs Client
Apps With New API Changes”,
TechCrunch 2012
Twitter
“MailChimp's Mandrill Move
Enrages Email Users”,
CMSWire 2016
Mandrill
“Netflix Kills Off Its Public API”,
TechCrunch 2014
Netflix
“Instagram Kills Off Feed
Reading Apps”,
TechCrunch 2015
Instagram

8. Former Twilio Employee
“In the tech community, I wish as
many people talked about our
awesome products as talk about
our awesome APIs…”

9. What Went Wrong
As an API service provider, the business will always think you focus too much on the community.
The community will think you always focus too much on the business.
Your job is to live in the happy-fun place where the two needs overlap.
And with proper planning, it isn’t that tough.
Business CommunityBoth

10. Active & Passive Communication Understand Every Single User
Be So Transparent
It Pushes Company Boundaries
The Path to Happiness

11. Active & Passive Communication
Passive channels are how
people check “Are you up?”
Passive is when people come
to you of their own accord.
The vast majority is “Is their
site down?” Have a Twitter
handle & a status page.
A blog is just a nice-to-have.
Mailing lists are still the
best way to inform
If you’re making a change,
there’s no better way to
inform people than email. It
requires maintaining a
healthy mailing list (from
MailChimp to Google
Groups), but it is worth it.
Watch the web
Not everyone realizes that
they can contact you before
taking to Twitter, Stack
Overflow or a blog to
complain. Use a service like
mention.net to be aware of
when people are talking.
Have an inbox
Contact forms are neat, but
people love email. +1 if you
attach it to something like
ZenDesk so people know the
person helping them and
your team can have a
searchable answer base.

12. Active & Passive Communication Understand Every Single User
The Path to Happiness
Be So Transparent
It Pushes Company Boundaries

13. Understand Every Single User
Use a CRM
Be intentional in storing what
you know about your users.
API Management solutions
change. Excel files get lost.
Inboxes get purged.
I like Highrise.
Turnover happens
There’s a tough balance
between being personal and
being realistic. Although
Pete at ACME has been your
point of contact, when Pete
leaves you still want to work
with ACME. Have a plan.
Collect metrics
& ask questions
People like knowing you
understand and care about
them. Automating your
solutions to understand
unexpected trends is the key
to providing unexpected joy.

14. Active & Passive Communication Understand Every Single User
The Path to Happiness
Be So Transparent
It Pushes Company Boundaries

15. Be So Transparent
It Pushes Company Boundaries
Be realistic.
Your system is a cog in a
machine. There are people
upstream from you and
downstream from you.
Inform everyone about
changes, with realistic-not-
optimistic predictions.
Make everyone a
“Community Manager”
Facebook nails this approach
with their handling of open
source. Empower everyone
to talk to customers.
Everyone appreciates talking
to a real human who is being
authentic.
Better to give bad news &
rollback, than hold back
bad news & surprise
People dislike bad news.
People hate bad events.
Don’t let short-term drops in
the polls jeopardize your
long-term potential.

16. 16
Celebrate the Victories, Everyone Loves Compliments
Celebrate when your
community talks about you…
Just remember that their
mentions are a byproduct of your
purpose, not your purpose

17. Thank You!
My Goal: A world where
using APIs becomes as
fundamental as using WWW
Shout out to coworkers at Best Buy,
especially those on developer.bestbuy.com,
for being the greatest & super supportive.
I’m ecaron everywhere
Twitter, Facebook,
GitHub, LinkedIn
I also read email
eric.caron@gmail.com