Speaker
Abstract
With thousands of APIs being built across the industry, serving millions of developers worldwide, and driving billions in revenue, there is a need to manage APIs as products. Building great API products requires both building technically sound APIs and creating an API experience to match.
This session dives into customer empathy-driven development of APIs, starting with conducting user research to map the customer journey, identifying opportunities for improvement, and designing an excellent API experience along with effective feedback loops to capture user feedback at every step to support iterative API development.
This session will deep dive into the following topics:
- Structured user research that feeds into an API producer lifecycle to serve customer needs
- Mapping API producer and API consumer lifecycle by roles and responsibilities
- Releasing iteratively for the controlled rollout of new APIs and features while setting customer expectations using a maturity-based distribution model
- Capturing and analyzing customer feedback to fuel the iterative evolution of your APIs.
Interview
The focus area of my work these days has been product management, but in the API product space. I am really focused on helping organizations build more successful APIs and helping them establish better API product management practices to help them achieve that goal.
The motivation behind my talk is really my own experience through the number of years of product management experience - having transitioned into API product management across Twilio, PayPal and now Postman. I've seen this gap: there is a lot of consumer-facing product management information available, but APIs are very unique in the kind of product management they require. The way a product manager needs to manage any product is significantly different from other types of products. I feel like that is something that I've learned over the years that I'm really excited to share with the people who are thinking about it or just getting started with API product management.
The target audience for my presentation are product and engineering leaders who are already managing large portfolios of APIs. I hope to enable them to think more strategically about APIs. Be it internal or external facing APIs and be able to think of them more in terms of products. So establishing APIs-as-a-product philosophy in organizations and making sure they have the big picture items to think about in, order to make their API programs more successful.
I would love for these personas to walk away with some tangible action items in terms of what they can do to answer the questions that would help them to build better products. So not just some things to think about, but also have frameworks and some actionable formulas to immediately apply to their current projects.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2022 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Modern APIs: Building and Evolving Hosted by Thomas Betts Senior Laureate Software Architect @BlackbaudFrom the same track
Tuesday 25 October
10:35 Ballroom BC Session Application Programming Interface API Evolution Without Versioning Brandon Byars North America Head of Technology @thoughtworks Versioning is usually the first–and too often, the only–technique architects reach for when imagining a breaking change to an API’s interface. Based on my experience managing the evolution of a public API, I’ve recently cataloged several alternative techniques and their tradeoffs. 11:50 Pacific DEKJ Session Application Programming Interface What API Product Managers Need Deepa Goyal Product Strategy @Postman, previously Product Developer @PayPal & @Twilio With thousands of APIs being built across the industry, serving millions of developers worldwide, and driving billions in revenue, there is a need to manage APIs as products. Building great API products requires both building technically sound APIs and creating an API experience to match. 13:40 Ballroom BC Session Application Programming Interface Scaling GraphQL Adoption at Netflix Tejas Shikhare Senior Software Engineer @Netflix GraphQL is steadily gaining popularity as an API technology choice for Client to Server communication. However, it can be daunting to realize the benefits of GraphQL without significant investment. 14:55 Ballroom BC Session [Panel] Who Cares About Your API? Brandon Byars, Jim Barton, Deepa Goyal, Tejas Shikhare Who cares about your API? Everyone. DevOps has shown us that when developers care about operations, they write better software. What other viewpoints should developers consider when they're building software? 16:10 Seacliff D Session Unconference: Modern APIs Shane Hastie Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com What is an unconference? At QCon SF, we’ll have unconferences in most of our tracks. 17:25 Ballroom BC Session Application Programming Interface Sidecars, eBPF and the Future of Service Mesh Jim Barton Field Engineer @Solo, previously @Redhat @Amazon & @Zappos Controversy over the future of service meshes and their architectures is swirling. This is a vital discussion as enterprise migration to microservice and Kubernetes-based architectures continue. This talk incorporates the latest community developments to explore what the future looks like.