This is the slide I presented in our quarterly product and engineering conference which was well received. Since the idea is generally applicable and there is nothing confidential in it, I thought of sharing it publicly.
We are living in times where the importance of APIs can not be overstated. Every company on the planet (including government organizations) is on a digital transformation journey and APIs are the greatest enablers for that journey. Even core technology companies which have always had API plays are re-looking at how they can get better at it and drive more value through APIs.
For APIs to become really successful, for sure, it has to provide some business value which could be data or function. That’s a given. But that alone is not enough. What makes APIs successful is more than that and there is a need take a holistic view and approach.
What makes APIs successful is AX.
AX is API experience.
Note: I have not ever come across this abbreviation so far and therefore like to believe that I coined it. :-)
AX can be broken down into 4 components.
AX = CX + PX + MX + OX
The first part is consumer experience. Consumer of an API is the developer who uses the APIs in her code. Needless to say this is the most important contributing factor which determines the API experience. How easy it is to discover the API, how easy it is to read and understand the documentation, how easy it is to try the API, how easy it is to use the API in a language of choice, how easy it is to use the API in conjunction with other APIs, how easy it is to get help on the API, all make up for the consumer experience.
The second part is producer experience. Producer is the developer(s) who creates the API in the first place. This is the person who is transforming a business value proposition to invokable code and therefore whose role is supremely important. The producer experience which constitutes what kind of design guidance is available, what tooling, what automation, what frameworks and example references are available, directly impacts the quality of APIs produced.
The third part is manager experience. How easily can business policies around APIs be managed? This could be things like user specific quotas, adding newer types of auth, getting visibility into usage, monetizing, deprecating old/less/unused APIs and so forth. These are the things API product managers care about and like everyone else they need to be able to do all of this with ease.
The fourth and the final is operator experience. Running an API at scale, performance SLAs, alerts, common enforcement points for security, auditing and governance are things which operations people are responsible for and their experience depends on how easily and reliably they can do these things.
For APIs to be successful and on a long-term basis, it is important to look at the overall picture and make deliberate effort to improve each aspect of AX.
The question always will be - How is the AX?