The fact that there is no hand-written manual or specification for approaching API products has given rise to various API designs. Perhaps the reason why integrating with APIs is often dreaded. In this talk, you will learn how to approach API products. You’ll start treating APIs as first-class citizens, revenue drivers as opposed to a code by-product. You will learn the secrets of building APIs that developers love to use.

1. Building API Products
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@samueljabiodun

2. James Samuel
~8 years of experience making
software run
#Technical content creator
#Engineer #TechLead
#Speaker
#AWS Community Builder 2
@samueljabiodun
@abiodunjames
@abiodunjames

3. 3
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6. Creating API Products
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7. API is eating the world

8. API has continued to gather popularity,
grew by 100% in 2020
Postman: State of the API Report
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9. ▪ Offers APIs to open up services e.g Twitter, Facebook,
Salesforce, etc
▪ API-first companies e.g Stripe, Contentful, Twilio, Algolia
etc
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10. Good APIs are:
❏ Easy Learn
❏ Easy to use
❏ Hard not-easy to misuse
❏ Easy to read and maintain clients that use them
❏ Easy to evolve
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11. Good API products make life easy
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12. How do you make life easy?

13. Understand the
“Why” and “How”
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14. ▪ Why do you want to build an API?
▪ What problem will it solve?
▪ How will the API help me achieve my goals?
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15. Example Goal: Drive usage and monetize internal
services
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16. The goal isn't always obvious
…Ask
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17. Design Matters
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18. ➔ Vocabularies- Are your words, terms easy to understand for your users?
➔ Styles - What protocols are you supporting, Rest or GraphQL?
➔ Naturalness & Consistency:
◆ Do your users have to change their usual ways of solving their problems
significantly?
◆ Did you follow established standards and conventions?
◆ What level of familiarity will you provide? Are you APIs similar to what your
users may have used in the past?

19. “Great API products are designed with
rigorous customer focus, a deep
understanding of the customers, their
needs and desires”
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20. Approaching API Design
▪ Identify users & activities they want to get done
▪ Break down activities
▪ Create APIs & Validate using a use-case
▪ Build API prototype and client prototype
▪ Validate & Re-iterate
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21. You won't get the first version of your APIs
right. Some lessons can't be learned
exclusively by customer interviews.
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22. Aligning Affordance
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23. Affordance is that property of an object
which shows users the actions they can
take.

25. Get Good at
Documentation
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26. What's one of the first things you look at
with a third party API?

27. If you’re providing only one type of
documentation, you’re undeserving your
users.
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28. ● Evaluation
● Integration
● Debugging

29. ● Who are you creating for?
● What are they trying to achieve?
● Why are you creating this?

30. Get Development
Right
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31. Instead of focusing on CRUD, focus on
goals and the sequence of actions
required to achieve them.

32. ● Scalability
● Maintainability
● Security
● Reliability
● Performance
● Security
● Testing

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Your APIs should hide complexities
and not expose them

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Conclusion

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Can the API Product deliver on the strategic
goals?
Is the API Product quality enough to support
the strategic goals?
Track Effectiveness

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Questions?