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API Products: The Role of an API
Product Manager
Uvindra Dias Jayasinha Bhathiya Jayasekara
Technical Lead Technical Lead

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APIs... the familiar
API Products?

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APIs as Products
• An instrument that is adding value to customers/users
• Brings strategic and monetary value
• Long lived entities, instead of a project that has a definite start and end
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APIs and their audiences
• API Providers - Developers who create the API
• API Consumers
– External App Developers
– Internal App Developers
– Citizen Integrators
• Business
– The owners of the API

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API Producers
• Looking to innovate and improve existing APIs
• Fix issues in existing APIs
• Develop new APIs
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API Consumers
• Interested in discovering APIs that meet their requirements
• Once APIs are found they should be easy to consume and integrate into
their Application
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Business
• Interested in leveraging APIs to gain strategic and monetary value
• How will exposing a given API bring about a business advantage and
contribute to growth?
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Image source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defining-api-product-manager-role-mark-o-neill/
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The Role of an API Product
Manager

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1. Identify APIs that need to be delivered
• Be selective
• How APIs should be composed.. Consider the Developer Experience(DX)
– Design new ones?
– Leverage existing ones?
• Consistency and standards
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2. Developer Experience(DX) Continued...
• Easy to discover & consume
• Mockups and Prototypes
• Sample usage, Try out facility & Documentation
• Forums and support portals
• Analytics data for Consumers
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3. Customizing the API offering
• Role based access to API resources
• Defining tier based business plans
• Targeted Monetization plans
– Free/Premium/Freemium
– Pay per usage or subscription based
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4. Release management
• Testing (Functional, Security, Performance)
• Release notes
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What’s Next?

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5. Managing API Lifecycle
• From API creation to retirement
• Multiple lifecycle states
– Custom states
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6. API Product Sustenance
• Maintain Performance, Availability and Reliability SLAs
- Monitoring and alerting
• Maintain Support SLA
- Monitoring and alerting
• Have responsive feedback channels
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7. Understanding how APIs are being used
• How developers discover, learn, use, troubleshoot etc.
• Business analytics
– Stats dashboards
– Identify usage patterns
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8. Evolving APIs through feedback
• Innovate
• API Versioning
– Default version
– Retire old versions
– Automatic subscription
• Change logs
• Roadmaps
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Q & A

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THANK YOU
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