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SPEAKER: In these courses, we deconstructed
the API product, introduced the API product mindset,
reviewed the customer experience with customer journeys
and personas, and now, we would like
to offer a few tips on how to formulate your API product
strategy, starting with the design of your API products.
Recall the keys to an API product mindset.
Approach the design with the consumer in mind,
enable fast time to market with reusable assets,
and don't boil the ocean.
But rather, iterate to continuously improve
the product.
API products are your digital product line.
And like any product line, it can target different consumers
by adding small tweaks to the product.
You should treat each API as you would any other product you
produce in your organization.
One of the simplest examples of a product
is made by the Coca-Cola beverage company.
The company originally came out with the Coca-Cola soda
and over the past 90 years have branched out
into fitness beverages, teas, juices,
and different types of water.
Each product has its own target audience.
For example, Adwala, Simply Orange, and Minute Maid
are beverages targeted at families with young children.
Fair Life and Core Power are targeted at the health
conscious and fitness fanatics.
And the Coca-Cola company also offers a variety
of water beverages, including Smart Water, Vitamin Water,
and ZICO coconut water.
Similarly, your API product strategy
will have different product offerings for different target
audiences.
You may have an API product for general partners
and a different API product for closely held partners.
For example, those partners that are
represented with the business associates agreement
with our company.
Your product strategy will begin to shape itself organically
as your product line grows and is important that you focus
on your API consumer needs.
Consider any digital transaction you engage in today.
Using your phone to buy coffee, ordering something online,
and then tracking the delivery, or even
updates in your bank account.
Each one of these transactions is an experience
with an API behind it.
When you design API products, you should ask questions like,
what problems do my API consumers face?
How do I make the API product easy to consume?
How might you measure the impact of the solution
you provided them?
Taking a broader view, you might ask yourself,
how do I get started?
And then a host of follow-on questions arise,
like do I start designing API products
for an internal audience or jump right
into an external audience?
Can proxies be reused in multiple API products?
Are there policies that are standard
across the enterprise that can be reused in API products?
The answers to these questions will form your API product
strategy, and furthermore, the strategy
must support your business.
With that said, as you embark on your API product strategy,
the best way to help guide your design
is to provide you with an example.
Let's look at the leading ticket sales and distribution company.
Their original target audience for APIs
were their own internal developers.
The company designed the APIs around event discovery
and online ticket sales to enable their developers
to bring new features to market faster, and in the process
quickly found other benefits when they
focused on the API consumer.
APIs were initially focused on their internal developers who
were creating applications for their internal call center
and online website for purchasing tickets.
The focus was purely on the needs of the internal developer
without much reusability in mind.
The top two problems the company faced
was how to secure the connection and the data
for the application and how to prevent bots
from simulating online purchasers holding tickets
and thus driving up the cost of the ticket
due to artificial demand.
In solving for the problems, the company
found that the security policies could
be reused by both internal and partner developers,
and so they were able to create API products were using
the same security policies for partners, such as Costco, who
included the ability to search for events and purchase tickets
on their website.
The company found that they could create API products
for each trusted partner while reusing the same security
policies and demand for their API products amongst partners
grew.
Due to the high demand, the company
found that they could engage additional third party
supply to help meet the demand.
Demand continued to grow with IoT devices coming
into the picture.
Consumers wanted to search for events
in order tickets via voice activated
devices, such as the Google Home Assistant,
and thus, an API product ecosystem
was born with demand and supply running through the API product
ecosystem powered by the Google Apigee platform.
The company grew from a limited supply delivered
through a closed private channel to a vibrant marketplace
with an ecosystem of API products
with third party suppliers to be consumed by new marketing
channels creating services that the company didn't
need to build.
The added benefit was that the new services cost little
to the company to provide.
There is no one approach to designing your API product
strategy.
Rather, there is an approach that you
can take to define an initial API product design
and refine it over time.
Your API product strategy will mature organically.
It's important that you don't boil the ocean
to begin your journey.
Use customer journeys and personas
to design API products that have a notable business impact
and iterate from there.
Along your journey, you'll find repeatable patterns,
such as the security rules mandated
by your corporate security office
that you will want to build out as standard policies
for re-use.
It's always a good idea to design your product
for external consumers, even if your initial audience is
internal.
Finally, review actual usage of your API products
and refine them based on your metrics and user feedback
to continuously improve your product.
Like your API products, your product strategy
will evolve over time.
Hopefully, you found a few strategies in this video
to define your API product strategy.
Thank you for watching.
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