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What Product Managers need to know about APIs

For your product to solve your customers’ problems, it likely needs to interact with at least one other product. As a Product Manager, you need to understand how your product communicates with others, and that means knowing more about those interfaces than how to spell API. Here’s a collection of resources that provide good foundational knowledge on working with APIs, including using them as the basis for a product.

What every Product Manager should know about APIs. APIs allow development teams to use data, functions, and applications to build new products simply. As a Product Manager, it is crucial to understand how APIs work and their huge potential within your team or company. APIs can be the key for organizations to expand quickly into new contexts or adapt to new markets with considerably reduced effort. Henrique Maltez covers the most important concepts you need to know about APIs as a Product Manager so you can talk about APIs with confidence to your stakeholders and your team.
(via henriquemaltezz)

API Design 101: API Product Management. Product teams use APIs to expose services offered by their product to both external and internal users. The users of the API can use data, functions, and applications to build powerful new products. Abhinav Garg wrote a two-part post to explain APIs from a product manager’ perspective. Part 1 explores API basics. Part 2 describes API Product Management and team organization.
(via @gargab)

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 Build Global Teams Quickly with Andela

Don't stress out

I’m typing this message up just days before the return of the in-person Global edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. In fact, this will be the first in-person edition of INDUSTRY in three years! To say that I’m excited for next week is a giant understatement. But since we’re all friends here, I thought I’d let you in on something else I’m feeling.

I’m super stressed.

It’s a healthy level of stress – and not any different than what I normally feel this close to conference time. I’m sharing this because I bet there are times when you’re also super stressed, whether it’s because of a new product launch, trying to do the same workload with fewer team members, or really, anything. 

When I’m feeling this way, though – there are a few things that help me (and may help you):

1. Reminding myself why I’m feeling stressed helps. INDUSTRY is coming right up next week and I simply want it to be great for all attendees. But after next week, I also know that my stress level will likely go way down. So there’s an end in sight!
    
2. I have to find a way to burn that stress off. Lots of different things help with it. In my case, biking, running, and working out all help a lot. So while there’s so much to do, I’m making it a point to find time to burn some of that stress off today however I can.
    
3. Focus on the things that I can control. I can’t control everything. Despite all of my best efforts living in Cleveland, Ohio, I just can’t control the weather. But there are lots of things that I can control… and it’s most productive to simply focus on those things. 

Despite the stress, I’ve been looking forward to next week for the past three years – and it can’t get here soon enough. 

So here we go – onto INDUSTRY!

How do you treat an API as a product? The API-as-a-Product strategy is gaining traction among product teams who seek to expose their services to the outside world. Productizing your API can be a relatively straightforward method to monetize your functionality and data on a per-call basis. The API product approach can also benefit indirect API business models, private APIs, and partner-to-partner integrations. Bill Doerrfeld explains how to apply a product technique to your APIs, no matter how or where they’re consumed. 
(via @DoerrfeldBill)

API as a product - the documentation. Many API providers pay little attention to the documentation they produce for their APIs. That’s unfortunate because documentation is the face of the product and the entry point to it. The problem becomes even worse when you acknowledge that it’s almost impossible to write help docs that developers consider satisfactory. Sergey Konstantinov looks at how to produce product documentation that considers how developers typically use API documentation.
(via @blogovodoved)

API product ideation and validation. You are familiar with APIs. You know the data and service assets that are at your disposal and you know the stakeholders. But if you’ve never thought about new API products, then this step-by-step guide to ideate and validate API product ideas based on a customer journey is for you. Amancio Bouza explains how to facilitate a workshop where you’ll create new ideas for API products, evaluate, prototype, and test them.
(via @AmancioBouza)

13 API Metrics That Every Platform Team Should be Tracking. Different teams need to track different API KPIs. Infrastructure teams care about different API metrics than API product or API platform teams. You may also track different API Metrics depending on where the API is in the product life cycle. Derric Gilling looks at the different API metrics you may track and explains when you may use each one.
(via @MoesifHQ)

How to Effectively Increase the Product Value (with Deepak Vittal)

Your product can mean different things to different customers. As a consequence there is no such thing as objective product value, at least when it comes to actually selling products.

Customers need to believe in your product enough to accept the price you’ve set for them.

However, the most important distinction between price and value is the fact that price is arbitrary and value is fundamental.

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” – Warren Buffet

In this discussion, we'll talk through all sorts of issues related to this, including how:
- You should constantly remind your customers about their intention and the goals they want to achieve when they pay for your product.
- Quantifying the value requires a deep understanding of the ultimate benefit for a customer.
- Differentiable value defines a unique solution to recognized challenges for a customer.
Plus, you'll get a chance to have questions of your own answered as well!

This webinar is brought to you by our friends at insightsoftware

How to Use Design Thinking as a Product Manager

It can be easy for Product Managers to hear the phrase "Design Thinking" — and assume that it's something that ought to be reserved for our colleagues working in design. But the reality is that even Product Managers who wouldn't describe themselves as "Designers" could really benefit from embracing Design Thinking. In this conversation, we'll dig into on why this is and how Product Managers can use Design Thinking for the benefit of themselves and their teams. Plus, you'll have a chance to ask questions of your own!

How delighting customers can go awry and what to do instead

We’ve learned that the key to building successful products is to iterate quickly and see what delights customers. Unfortunately, it turns out that chasing customer delight can lead to common product diseases and doesn’t guarantee a successful product.
In this discussion, the author of Radical Product Thinking will share concrete examples to illustrate how delighting customers can go awry and a radical approach to turn things around. Plus, you'll have a chance to ask questions of your own as well.

1. A newsletter each and every Friday centered around an important product topic, like roadmapping, strategy, and analytics.
2. Access to a thriving Slack group with thousands of others to share advice, tips and get feedback on your work.
3. Plus, invitations to exclusive video chats, special member privileges at the conferences we hold in the United States and Europe, and more!