Fail, fast, forward. This is a mindset that everyone who is tackling a digital transformation initiative is tasked with executing. Modernize, Transform, Go Agile, Scale!
Sounds good, looks cool on a t-shirt, but how do you translate this into a way to roll out new products? How do you truly evolve the portfolio of your company and sustain this change such that it impacts the core of your enterprise solution set?
Preferably, without also opening up your enterprise to new security risks or blind spots?
What is an API as a Product strategy?
An “API as a Product” strategy is built on treating all APIs that contribute to your organization’s business goals as products – and then managing them accordingly.
This means treating APIs as standalone products, packaging them with value propositions, documentation, and subscription plans, and strategically linking them to business capabilities to cater to the target audience.
Over the past decade or so, development and product teams have extensively employed the concept of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to harmonize the building and release of software products.
The folks at Spotify tweaked this concept and strategy to support greater team autonomy and product innovation with the goal of releasing products and features faster.
Today, many organizations say they want to “Spotify our team” to benefit from this team structure, but what’s missing from the equation when it comes to the product and more specifically, “API as a Product”?
They need the 4Cs framework for a successful API as a Product strategy.
The 4Cs framework for an API as a Product strategy
Whether you’re a Product Owner, Squad member, or Chapter lead, leveraging and employing a mindset that accounts for the 4Cs will help deliver success to your program.
Learn why you should treat your API as a product.
C1: API Creation — Enabling customer experience
All products and services are brought to life when an inspired soul chooses to chase a new idea or tweak an existing one to address customer needs in a new way.
Though APIs are an inherently technical concept, their creation is not isolated to dev teams alone.
API Creation is something that starts with the digital team or digital studio in the enterprise envisioning a new customer experience and wanting to launch it quickly by streamlining certain processes, enabling a new interface, or accessing new or existing business logic to address a customer pain point.
In evaluating these types of problems, capturing the idea and documenting the general strategy is a core goal of the product owner, while creating the actual API lives with the developer.
Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in organizations, that alignment is sometimes lacking. Nearly half of decision-makers feel they lack essential alignment between line of business and IT, according to Axway’s new enterprise API strategy survey.
To truly harmonize this relationship and power the best and brightest IT, lines of business, and digital strategy teams to work together, the role and focus of picking API creation tools is critical to your success and cannot be overlooked.
An important point here: merely creating APIs and sending them out into the wild to proliferate is a recipe for disaster.
To avoid the growing pains of API sprawl, enterprises need a truly federated API management platform. Developers want the freedom to use the development tools that work best for them without worrying about restrictions imposed by multiple API gateway vendors or cloud deployments.
A unified platform opens the door to automated, agent-based API observability and subscription management. And as we’ll soon see, these are critical capabilities for the next three C’s.
C2: API Consumption — Driving success
Following the concept of API creation, an equally important area to address and continuously evaluate is API Consumption and the consumer experience. Delivering results in this area requires a full-time product role that someone needs to own, and it should be analytics-driven.
It’s not okay for the dev team or DevOps team to look simply at what APIs are failing, used most, and are buggy. Someone with a product mindset must trend the APIs, profile how are they being used, in what combinations, for what purpose, and to what result.
In the following video, we discuss API metrics you should be tracking to demonstrate the value of your API product strategy – and continuously improve it.
What are API metrics and how do you measure them?
API Product Managers should ask themselves questions like:
- Can these APIs be further simplified to underlying logic that may be obscured in its current form?
- Can the resulting simplification thus result in new products and services that the company can monetize?
- Who is accessing these APIs and why? (with an eye to business, yes, but remember too that the largest attack vector in most organizations is unmanaged, unsecured APIs.)
If you’re on this wavelength, your path to API Zen is well underway, but you may not be there yet…
Don’t forget that:
- a high number of transactions ≠ success, and
- total number of APIs ≠ digital success.
It’s all about the value that’s being unlocked, harnessed, and packaged in new offerings that expand your potential and support your growth and self-disruption.
Read more about closing the gap between API development and API consumption
C3: API Codification — Establishing the rules of the road
Alright, we understand the concepts of API Creation and API Consumption. Now what?
Most companies began their API journeys by building a few APIs to expose a data set internally. Now, organizations are starting to open their ecosystems and expose APIs to external audiences.
In fact, our enterprise API strategy survey found a majority of APIs being used by an enterprise (57%) are now exposed externally.
Before rushing your rich set of digital assets to market, don’t forget to consider issues of around API duplication, security, and governance in this new multi-cloud, multi-platform landscape.
It starts with API Codification.
To achieve a successful API strategy where your API creation and consumption truly scale and impact the business positively, you need to create some rules around your API adoption.
In this case, API codification is all about leveraging your architects, team leads, product owners, and business stakeholders to come together and outline some standards.
- How are your APIs going to be used?
- What’s the desired usage and what is allowed?
- What type of usage will not be allowed?
- How will we track and enforce the rules?
- How will we explore rule-breaking from an external standpoint to see if we’re missing something?
Consistent patterns in everything from authentication methods to data formats leaves more time to focus on building APIs rather than troubleshooting errors.
Dive deeper: The role of API standards in an enterprise strategy
This activity and ownership can be triggered in the design phase and blessed by your Center of Excellence, but as a process, it must take life and continue to evolve.
Keep in mind that the more you can automate tasks like documentation, coding, and regulatory compliance checks, the easier it will be for developers to remain compliant with rules you are codifying.
One of the greatest security risks to your organization from API use is leaving security to dev teams. Not having that cross-enterprise standardization and automation in place makes implementation haphazard.
This is why Amplify Platform automates the discovery, testing, and validation of all API assets, so developers can quickly discover any unmanaged APIs and ensure the proper security policies are enforced.
In this clip from a recent demo of Amplify Enterprise Marketplace, Arun Dorairajan, Senior Solution Architect at Axway, shows how it offers a single source of truth regarding your digital assets.
Codifying rules of the road is key to providing structure and guardrails to development and product teams. And it certainly should not be a one-time effort. Rather, it must avoid becoming stale and hence requires continuous attention.
API codification is something that should be done in your traditional CD/CI mindset, i.e. do it continuously and constantly apply your learnings to keep your APIs flexible and well-suited to maximizing their value.
C4: API Curation – Packaging value
Nice, you’ve made it this far. There’s one last – and very important – point to consider: API Curation.
This concept is where the money is made and lost. The difference between launching and flaming out, or launching, sustaining, and growing.
In this scenario, now that you’ve defined an API-as-a-Product strategy that involves building/creating, identifying your target personae/consumers, and writing some rules/codification, you must also think about evolving the API as a product based on your market findings.
This is where curation is critical and is often missed. Curating your APIs is incredibly important because you’ve launched your initial vision and APIs into the wild, but now you’re about to learn what’s good, what’s no longer needed, and what changes must be made to stay ahead of the competition.
Additionally, you’ll want to stage your API products in an easy-to-access “storefront:” an API marketplace is where you collect, package, and expose the API products you want others to discover and use.
While an API portal focuses on APIs as a technical interface and is predominantly for internal use cases, a marketplace offers a central repository focused on API products – both internally and as business services for external users.
See also: 5 reasons companies are adding API marketplaces to their API portals
In this clip from a demo of Amplify Enterprise Marketplace, Arun Dorairajan shows how an API marketplace makes it easy to productize your APIs so they are all packaged and ready to go.
You can release APIs in bundles, catalog them, combine them with other assets, and make them easy to discover, access, and use in places well beyond a website or internal code repository.
What’s in an API product? Consider some of the following elements when curating and bundling assets and resources into a complete API product:
- Product-level documentation that describes its capability
- Anticipated business goals and value drivers
- A high-level process that consumers need to understand to get the most value
- A minimum set of metadata to describe and categorize the product (this reduces the time it takes for API consumers to find and subscribe to it)
- Contact information for the team supporting the product
- Subscription plan (even if you are not directly monetizing an API, a free subscription plan allows you to define any limits or terms for consumption)
- At least 1 asset
Note: An asset logically groups resources by the business data object(s) returned by the API’s responses and the underlying logical backend service for which this API gets the data. Keep in mind that an API resource can be contained by multiple assets which, in turn, can be contained by multiple products.
In sum: your APIs need to be set free and made available to your partner ecosystem in a way that makes sense to the intended consumers.
Reminder: centralized governance is foundational to driving API value
Establishing visibility and control over all APIs plays a crucial role in shaping the success of an enterprise’s API strategy – and in maximizing the value these assets help create across the entire API landscape.
Beyond hampering the effectiveness of a go-to-market strategy, unknown and unmanaged APIs represent a major security risk.
Unfortunately, this is a widespread challenge: Axway’s 2024 State of Enterprise API Maturity report found that most enterprises struggle with having sufficient visibility over all their APIs.
Organizations need a centralized, up-to-date inventory of all APIs – something that can only really be accomplished with federated API management.
This is why Amplify Enterprise Marketplace offers a single place to validate and secure APIs. API product managers can address one of the primary security concerns by checking known APIs against possible rogue ones.
See also: From Zombies to Legacy or Shadow APIs, it’s time to remediate your lost APIs
Execute your enterprise API vision with the 4Cs
Taken to heart and built on a secure foundation, these 4 Cs will help drive the success of your API strategy and digital initiatives.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen the omission of a comprehensive view of API strategy, both in the development and product worlds. This lack of vision, execution, and continuity has led to millions of dollars wasted on launching, relaunching, and parking efforts that could have truly differentiated an organization.
Instead, money is spent, release happens to hit a timeline, and the results are underwhelming because the roles and strategy required to not only launch but sustain were missing.
Enterprise leaders are beginning to grasp the vision. APIs are part of the go-to-market strategy for 99.5% of organizations.
This is excellent news! But it’s critical that as enterprises move forward, IT and LOB are tightly aligned in executing this strategy.
And make sure you don’t let “lost APIs” and insufficient governance put the brakes on your momentum.
Download our guide to creating an enterprise API strategy.
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