API Analytics for Product Managers

Research, strategize, market, and continuously measure the effectiveness of APIs to meet your SaaS business goals with this practical handbook

Key Features

• Transform your APIs into revenue-generating entities by turning them into products
• Meet your business needs by improving the way you research, strategize, market, and measure results
• Create and implement a variety of metrics to promote growth

Book Description

APIs are crucial in the modern market as they allow faster innovation. But have you ever considered your APIs as products for revenue generation?

API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development.

Of course, it's not all about the product—as any good product manager knows; you need to understand your customers' needs, expectations, and satisfaction too. Once you've gathered your data, you'll need to be able to derive actionable insights from it. This is where the book covers the advanced concepts of leading and lagging metrics, removing bias from the metric-setting process, and bringing metrics together to establish long- and short-term goals.

By the end of this book, you'll be perfectly placed to apply product management methodologies to the building and scaling of revenue-generating APIs.

What you will learn

• Build a long-term strategy for an API
• Explore the concepts of the API life cycle and API maturity
• Understand APIs from a product management perspective
• Create support models for your APIs that scale with the product
• Apply user research principles to APIs
• Explore the metrics of activation, retention, engagement, and churn
• Cluster metrics together to provide context
• Examine the consequences of gameable and vanity metrics

Who this book is for

If you're a product manager, engineer, or product executive charged with making the most of APIs for your SaaS business, then this book is for you. Basic knowledge of how APIs work and what they do is essential before you get started with this book, since the book covers the analytical side of measuring their performance to help your business grow.

Table of Contents

1. API as a Product
2. API Product Management
3. API Life Cycle and Maturity
4. Building and Managing API Products
5. Growth for API Products
6. Support Models for API Products
7. Walking in the Customer's Shoes
8. Customer Expectations and Goals
9. Components of API Experience
10. Infrastructure Metrics
11. API Product Metrics
12. Business Metrics
13. Drawing the Big Picture with Data
14. Keeping Metrics Honest
15. Counter Metrics to Avoid Blind Spots
16. Decision-Making with Data

Deepa Goyal is a Silicon Valley veteran with diverse experience in Fortune 500 tech and start-ups. She is currently the lead product management strategist at Postman, where she helps millions of developers build application programming interfaces (APIs). Previously, she worked at PayPal and Twilio, where she grew the companies’ API offerings, which are used by the software developer community for thousands of third-party websites and mobile apps. Deepa is skilled in both product management and data science. She uses the insights she gets from data science in her product management work.