Your API is a Product, so why doesn't it have a Product Manager?
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APIs are often an afterthought when it comes to interaction design, but a Product Manager considering the human aspects of APIs can make them a much more strategic asset.
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Your API is a Product, so why doesn't it have a Product Manager?
- 1. Colin McGovern Product Management cmcgovern@axway.com / @colinmcgovernpm © 2020 Axway Your API is a product, so why doesn’t it have a Product Manager?
- 2. This is what happens when interfaces are seen as a purely technical challenge © 2020 Axway
- 3. In the 1970s, Xerox Parc imagined something so much better… © 2020 Axway
- 4. Which eventually became this in MS Windows 1.0 © 2020 Axway
- 5. The Windows UI has come a long way © 2020 Axway
- 6. And we don’t stop at visual representations, we try to take advantage of other forms of interaction © 2020 Axway
- 7. We even put interaction design into films that inspires more progress © 2020 Axway
- 8. But our APIs still often still get this much design attention… © 2020 Axway
- 9. © 2020 Axway Ticketmatic are a successful event ticketing company…
- 10. © 2020 Axway …with great reviews from their customers
- 11. And this is their API © 2020 Axway
- 12. © 2020 Axway I couldn’t understand what information I’d get from this endpoint
- 13. © 2020 Axway I tried this command to see what the API returns But I don’t have credentials
- 14. © 2020 Axway The portal has no mention of how you authorise against the API, or how you would ask for credentials
- 15. © 2020 Axway You can download a spec, but it doesn’t mention authorisation either
- 16. © 2020 Axway Lastly, there’s no contact details for developers on the portal to get help and I’m not going to contact their sales team just to satisfy my curiosity.
- 17. © 2020 Axway If your company doesn’t need external developers, you may think you don’t need to worry about this, but how do your developers learn about each other’s APIs when building your core systems?
- 18. We often see computer design as technical, especially with interfaces like APIs, but really, design is always human © 2020 Axway “People are imaginative and creative, filled with common sense; that is, a lot of valuable knowledge built up over years of experience. But instead of capitalising on these strengths, machines require us to be precise and accurate, things we are not very good at. Machines have no leeway or common sense. Moreover, many of the rules followed by a machine are known only by the machine and its designers. When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications.”
- 19. © 2020 Axway What does a human need from an API? • APIs that don’t change too much • When APIs change, they want to be informed • They can read clear documentation with examples • It’s possible to experiment with the API to understand it • How they find help is clearly stated • They can achieve as much as possible by themselves
- 20. © 2020 Axway So shouldn’t this talk be centred around UX design?
- 21. © 2020 Axway Product Managers link API goals with company strategy
- 22. © 2020 Axway • Should this API be revenue generating (directly or indirectly), or reduce operational costs? • How should my customer-facing API be marketed to end- users? • What should the onboarding experience be for my API? • What innovations are happening in my developer community that I should be paying attention to? • Is my API meeting objectives we set? What should we do about that? What companies are now considering around API strategy
- 23. © 2020 Axway Github have a Product Manager dedicated to their API
- 24. © 2020 Axway • To grow, GitHub needs to acquire new developers, who will want to automate their development flow to include GitHub. • The more integrated GitHub becomes in their flow, the more sticky it becomes. • GitHub encourages a culture of sharing solutions, boosting each other’s work. • To be taken seriously by developers, their developer experience must be great. GitHub’s Apparent Strategy* *Gleaned from what you find on their site
- 25. © 2020 Axway How does Github acquire new developers? A marketplace advertises the extensible nature of the platform. “Get to use our API!”
- 26. © 2020 Axway How does Github acquire new developers? Github have identified the topics that would prevent a developer from adopting their API and addressed them directly
- 27. © 2020 Axway How does Github acquire new developers? Unlike the Ticketmatic example, Github deals with authentication as its first topic, so I can understand how to gain access and learn
- 28. © 2020 Axway How does Github acquire new developers? If I hit problems, they are also very clear about how to reach them. Note the guaranteed response
- 29. © 2020 Axway How does Github make itself sticky? A vibrant marketplace rich with solutions encourages adoption. Encouraging developers to integrate Github with every aspect of their process, makes them completely embedded.
- 30. © 2020 Axway How does Github make itself sticky and create a culture of sharing? They create a community of developers who all support each other
- 31. © 2020 Axway How does Github make itself sticky and create a culture of sharing? Developers are explicitly encouraged to extend the marketplace with their own solutions
- 32. © 2020 Axway How does Github deliver a great developer experience? They have created an explorer that allows you to test any call to learn how it works. If you log in, you can use your own real data
- 33. © 2020 Axway How does Github deliver a great developer experience? Every update is communicated to their API consumers
- 34. © 2020 Axway • The marketing of Github’s API is very consciously aimed at developers, and the API delivers on the marketing. • There is a very strong awareness of customer journey (and in particular onboarding) throughout. • The decision to build a GraphQL API seems a conscious effort to stay at the bleeding edge, but the extensive training material indicates that they try to make their developers great. Where do I see a Product Manager’s fingerprints?
- 35. © 2020 Axway I am not building a platform for developers, so how does this apply to me?
- 36. © 2020 Axway • When internal APIs are not aligned with business objectives, they fail to produce the benefits originally intended, leading to wasted IT spend. • Bad documentation, design, on-boarding leads to poor adoption, duplicated effort, delayed projects. • A lack of objectives often means that success criteria are poorly defined, if at all, so it’s difficult to decide what data to collect or what KPIs to measure against. • Poor data means poor decision making when deciding how to develop APIs further. A lack of Product thinking often means:
- 37. © 2020 Axway • Every shared API has success criteria derived from company goals. • API design and documentation is given the same level of care and attention as the User Interfaces • APIs are discoverable! • The developer journey is well understood and designed for • Metrics are collected, measured against KPIs, and used to inform future decisions The API habits of a Product-thinking Enterprise
- 38. Lastly, when your APIs are products, you become inspired to create any many great experiences for your developers as you do for your customers. © 2020 Axway
- 39. © 2020 Axway Thank You Colin McGovern Product Management cmcgovern@axway.com / @colinmcgovernpm
Editor's Notes
- Maybe unfair to the designers of this, but most importantly, they didn’t have to particularly worry about people they didn’t know using it. They didn’t know strangers who would use it, but they knew they were expected to be trained to use the machine, not the other way round.
- What Xerox parc did was truly revolutionary. Nobody at the time was imagining how you would make computers accessible to everyone. That wasn't a mainstream idea. It's remarkable as well how similar this picture still is to our current interfaces. Xeroc Parc were basically the Beatles
- Apple obviously tried to create something like this too after Steve Jobs's visit, but it's remarkable how faithful this is to the original. In some respects, this is easier to use than...
- The look is a lot sleeker, but possibly less easy to use. Either way, you can see how mainstream an idea it is that a computer should not need a manual to be interacted with.
- We always talk about the screen, but it's also assumed that how you control a computer is well designed. Compare this to the original computer.
- Computer interface design is so mainstream now that we're considering in our arts and culture what's possible, and do it in a way that's accessible to everyone.
- I'm not suggesting your APIs should be accessible to your less-technically gifted relative, but what I want to emphasise is just how little we regard the user experience of a developer for our APIs. It's a technical item, so we should just give them a manual, except we don't even do that.
- Apologies to Ticketmatic here, I just googled looking for examples of APIs and found this.
- Ticketmatic are clearly a company that please their customers. Looking at the website, they seem to be doing pretty well.
- Look at how basic this screen is. Developers may not need a red carpet, but they should at least get an explanation of what this API is and what it does. Instead, you just get a list of endpoints. So you might say, well those niceties don't matter, let's just see what each endpoint does.
- You might say, "well it gives me back newsletter preferences!", except a developer needs to know what fields are in a preference, what types are those fields, etc...
- The first thing a developer will do in a situation like this is try to call anything on the API to see if they can get data from it to understand it better. Of course, I couldn't do that because I needed credentials.
- So I look for some credentials, except there's no information whatsoever on how I might obtain them.
- I don't even know what type of credentials to look for. By the way, this spec is what generated the previous page. What a developer has done is rendered their API and put up an automatically generated page, while adding no extra information whatsoever.
- So if I had been asked by my boss to assess their API and compare it with those of other competitors before we contact any of them, then I'm now none the wiser, and my advice to my boss will be "I believe that this API is an afterthought, I think they published it to tick a box the way people used to create websites to tick a box"
- You now have a situation where this company has created an API, published it, but it is not generating any business for them whatsoever, in fact, it might even be putting potential users of their API off. Maybe your business doesn't have to worry about this, but is it any less important if your users are in your company already?
- This quote describes what humans need from anything they use to complete a task. Very few companies building APIs for anyone, internal or external, have taken this message to heart. If you cannot make it work, then it's because you didn't know what you were doing.
- But what does a human actually need from an API?
- So far, I've only talked about the design of your API, where does product fit?
- Remember that example. What were the business drivers for Ticketmatic's API? What if it turns out that they miss business opportunities because people realise it's an afterthought and they had a partner integration in mind?
- Placeholder for structure
- How many of you have back doors like this?