May 8, 2021
API Product Management for strategic growth of organization
API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other
APIs play a very important role in our day to day life. Be it booking air tickets for travel, booking hotels, banking transaction, insurance transaction or e-commerce purchase. APIs are used behind the scenes and simplifies integration of products and services
Adoption of API for communicating over Internet started by start of year 2000 with availability of HTTP and RESTFul framework. API technology evolution is explained in the picture below. Many of us know API from a technology perspective. But value that can be given to Business and Customers using APIs was identified by some of the early adopters of Internet technologies to bring digital transformation to organizations.
There were early adopters who leveraged public APIs as a key strategy for their growth. They looked from a Value framework rather than a technology. they leveraged technology to resolve Industry problems. Some of the key organizations are Salesforce, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Twilio and eBay. The commerce age of web APIs was dominated by three companies: Salesforce, eBay, and Amazon. Twenty years later, they remain commercial powerhouses and continue to shape the world of APIs.
Lets us first look at how Salesforce leveraged Internet, Cloud computing and Public APIs for their growth. After working for 13 years at Oracle, Mark Benioff in 1999 dreamed about his mission in a marketing statement as “The End of Software” and having software on the Internet. His core mission was to give CRM software to all Marketing and Sales people.
Salesforce understood the importance of APIs and started leveraging them from day one of building their CRM software product. On February 7th, when the Salesforce officially launched its API at the IDG Demo 2000 conference. Salesforce was an enterprise-class, web-based, sales force automation as a “Internet as a service”. XML APIs were part of Salesforce.com from day one.
Salesforce.com identified that customers needed to share data across their different business applications, and APIs were the way to do this. Marc R. Benioff, chairman and founder of salesforce.com stated, “Salesforce.com is the first solution that truly leverages the Internet to offer the functionality of enterprise-class software at a mere fraction of the cost.”
Salesforce.com was the first cloud provider to take an enterprise class web application and API and deliver what we know today as Software-as-a-Service. They built Public APIs for their key functionality and had partners and developers use the Public APIs to enrich their functionality. This helped Salesforce to reach to larger developer and partner community and helped in developing more features & Functionality, which in turn helped more adoption of Software as Service by many customers.
Even with SalesForce being the first mover in the world of web APIs, they are still a powerhouse in 2016. SalesForce continues to lead when it comes to real-time APIs, testing, deployment and most recently taking a lead when it comes to mobile application development and backend as a service (BaaS). Even today Salesforces gets more than 50% of their revenue through Public APIs..
In 2018 they have continued to accelerate and bet on API Economy with the acquisition of Mulesoft for 6 Billion deal. As per Marc Benioff “Every digital transformation starts and ends with the customer,” Vision is to enable customers to connect all of the information throughout their enterprise across all public and private clouds and data sources, radically enhancing innovation.
Salesforce saw value management is the key and developed public APIs to bring the value to the customers / partners and developers. Product Manager is the key Orchestrator of this process and play a very crucial role in understanding the following
- Identifies problems that are worth solving using APIs,
- Defines the Value Proposition
- Captures the value with the right pricing model
- Reaches the identified persona “Developer / Partner”, “Buyer” etc through right channels
- Delivers the value when APIs are adopted and used
Product Managers play a very key role in Salesforce in choosing the right value proposition, right Public APIs, reach developers / partners through right channels and increased adoption of their services.
Organization are accelerating their Digital transformation journey and Public APIs development will continue to scale. Currently there are around 22000 Public APIs with an average of 1400+ APIs newly being developed every year. API product Managers will play a very significant role in developing a growth strategy for an organization and build conglomerates like Salesforce, Amazon, Netflix etc.
With Web 3.0, online services have evolved from a software-based delivery model to a thing based model. This is the transformation of SaaS into XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service), wherein any tangible object can be offered as a service.
Airbnb and Uber are some examples of XaaS model. With the changing business landscape because of API Economy, Product Managers are all the more relevant for organizations to build products helping accelerating their growth strategy. This has been confirmed by Gartner market research and 54% of the organizations ranked saying, Missing key roles such as API product Manager as one of their top 3 API strategy Challenges. We will see more and more API product managers requirements in the forthcoming years. Welcome to the world of API product management
