The role of an API product manager is to: 1. Identify APIs that need to be delivered and ensure they have a good developer experience. 2. Customize the API offering with access control, pricing plans, and monetization strategies. 3. Manage the API lifecycle from creation to retirement, including release management, sustaining performance, and evolving APIs based on feedback.

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

2. APIs... the familiar
API Products?

3. 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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4. 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

5. API Producers
• Looking to innovate and improve existing APIs
• Fix issues in existing APIs
• Develop new APIs
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6. 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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7. 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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8. Image source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defining-api-product-manager-role-mark-o-neill/
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9. The Role of an API Product
Manager

10. 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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11. 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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12. 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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13. 4. Release management
• Testing (Functional, Security, Performance)
• Release notes
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14. What’s Next?

15. 5. Managing API Lifecycle
• From API creation to retirement
• Multiple lifecycle states
– Custom states
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16. 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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17. 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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18. 8. Evolving APIs through feedback
• Innovate
• API Versioning
– Default version
– Retire old versions
– Automatic subscription
• Change logs
• Roadmaps
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19. Q & A

20. THANK YOU
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