The API First Paradigm Shift
'API First' thinking accelerates adoption, speed to market, and business value. We discuss important principles covering Developer Experience and GTM strategies for building successful API products.
Photo by Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash
Over the last decade, companies are innovating at an even faster pace due to new technology architecture principles cloud computing such as distributed computing, microservices, IoT and AutoML. In particular, “API First” design principles have enabled millions of developers around the world to accelerate speed to market of new ideas.
Companies like Algolia, Plaid, Stripe and Twilio and are just a few of hundreds of companies at the helm of leading edge innovation in their fields by doubling down on API First. The tailwinds in technology favour those companies who can deliver impact for large institutions who manage legacy platforms by acting as a knife-edge that solves complex problems without disrupting business operations. For these institutions, new solutions need to integrate directly into enterprise grade legacy architectures and technology stacks where the cost and risk of change is high.
API First principles are uniquely positioned not only to address this concern but also provide a modular component architecture that reduces switching cost to replace one API service with a higher performing one, thereby preventing vendor lock-in. More importantly, API First allows developers to focus on solving the core business problem first while combining best of breed APIs for generalized platform architecture. This reduces cost to prove value and time to market.
Simplifying enterprise architecture by unbundling the monolith and focusing on key value propositions accelerates time to market and reduces cost
It is no wonder API First has become the emergent design paradigm in technology. It has spurred a new generation of innovative startups that seek to build products with minimal cost by concentrating efforts on their core business problem while using battle tested production grade APIs for almost every imaginable problem.
API First allows developers to focus on the core business problem by combining best of breed software from around the world. This reduces cost to prove value and time to market.
— Gaurav Sood
API First principles can have a significant influence on a company and product strategy. As a company evaluating API First, the below are noteworthy considerations as you embark on this journey.
Focus on USPs
Businesses can be more customer centric, addressing the domain specific problems with their value propositions; be it data, an algorithm, transaction processing or compute capability. This accelerates time to market and reduces costs.
Rapid Hypothesis Validation
Innovative startups can use the API product to prove or disprove a hypothesis based on customer adoption rather than build a full stack web application which is more expensive. This prevents sunk cost of bloated innovation and can be a competitive source of cost differentiation as well as rapid market innovation.
Developer Focused GTM Strategy
API First means building for Developers First. This has a major impact on a product’s GTM strategy. B2D(eveloper) is different to traditional B2G and B2B where personas are now a technical audience who have in-depth market and technical knowledge. Thus positioning, messaging, marketing, pricing and sales strategies all need to line up to deliver successful adoption and revenue growth. An increasing focus on Product Marketing to developers is needed to enable GTM efforts.
Marketing efforts may combine a mix of SEO, performance and community development to engage a wide ecosystem through developer forums, company branded developer communities and conferences like APIDays. Digital marketing and website design play a major role in customer acquisition to improve Developer Experience and self-service onboarding. The role of ‘API Evangelist’ has emerged who are market facing leads to represent the company in various technical forums.
Sales teams need in-depth training on use cases and product features to be sufficiently equipped to serve the needs of customers creatively and collaboratively. Sales also need to partner with technical pre-sales engineers or solution architects to enable adoption and in-field use case validation. Therefore, selection factors such as sovereign data management, VPC coverage and SOC compliance need to be addressed early in this discovery process and should be aligned to the GTM strategy by industry sector, geography and customer use cases.
API First means Developer First. This has a major impact on a company's entire GTM strategy - from positioning, pricing and promotion, to marketing and sales.
— Gaurav Sood
Trial to Purchase
The most important aspect of API First is the role Developers play in as buyers and decision makers. Their ability to test and validate API product suitability is crucial in the discovery process prior to purchasing. Developers need the ability access high quality documentation, example use cases and sandbox environments to test the API. Developer customers work hand-in-glove with the company through this journey that may overlap with a procurement process. This process may be lengthy depending on the complexity of the use case and customer, with ROI being proven through a POC.
Developer Experience
The ease with which developers can discover and trial a product, integrate it and support it in future solves for the ‘Developer Experience’. A key factor is the self learning and support process that is achieved via digital platforms such as a corporate website, documentation pages, discussion boards, and a Developer Portal. Therefore, a great Developer Experience lowers acquisition cost and accelerates adoption, hence increasing revenue growth.
There are numerous aspects to improving Developer Experience, the following are just a few:
Detailed product documentation built with RESTful design principles to cover how the product works with in-browser response mocking
Data explorers covering logical data model relationships, coverage, veracity, pedigree, completeness and provenance
Downloadable SDKs and example use cases as code libraries
API build support for multiple devices and programming languages with simple installation
Transparent API versioning strategy to enable developers to plan and self-manage migration pathway
Developer portal to manage application development with promotion process and billing information
Pricing calculators to provide transparency for purchase and scale decisions
Discussion boards, blogs and technical forum to collaborate and support developer ecosystems
Web Products as APIs
Web applications built with an API First design give customers flexibility in how they want to consume a product. As an example, many API products have a supporting web portal that enables customers to configure, manage and report on the API product. However, by using the API First approach, a customer may integrate exposed APIs of the web portal into its in-house web platforms and workflows so that it can tailor and automate how it wants to manage the API product based on their business requirements. This can help drive automation, business process automation and policy management across larger API product installations.
Platform Strategy
APIs can become reusable building blocks to form the backbone of future products and services both internally and for customers. This helps create a platform of reusable services to form the bedrock of your technology architecture. This is also called ‘dogfooding’ i.e. using your own products to solve your problems. Leveraging platform thinking helps API teams to build higher quality products by having access to friendly internal customers to trial and validate APIs before scaling.
The most successful example of a company that solved its IT challenges and then productized its APIs is AWS. If you are solving internal problems with your own APIs because no other company has a solution for your requirements, you could be on the precipice of solving a much larger industry problem that is of great value.
Open Source
For some companies, API First can enable access to the open source community that can be beneficial to drive adoption, to identify innovative new use cases and provide early detection of security issues. Open source projects have birthed projects from the Android OS to Bitcoin. Building in open source communities has the added benefit of being able to recruit developers who are deeply knowledgeable and interested in your domain.
As your company builds its product strategy, consider using the API First approach as a powerful paradigm to bring your products to market faster, cheaper and to a massive developer ecosystem who are spurring the next wave of innovation. Good luck!
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