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:
What's the focus of your work these days?
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.
What's the motivation behind your talk?
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.
How would you describe the persona and level of your target audience?
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.
Is there anything specific that you would like this persona to walk away with after watching your presentation?
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.
Speaker
Deepa Goyal
Product Strategy @Postman, previously Product Developer @PayPal & @Twilio
Deepa Goyal is a Product Strategy leader at Postman. She brings a wealth of experience in data science and APIs. She has been part of product development at startups as well as Fortune500s, PayPal and Twilio. She is a champion for applying product thinking to building API products, women in tech and data-driven decision-making.
She is about to publish her first book API Analytics for Product Managers that comes out February 2023. She is resides in San Francisco, California.
Find Deepa Goyal at:
Date
Friday Dec 2 / 10:10AM PST ( 50 minutes )
