API Analytics for Product Managers: Understand key API metrics that can help you grow your business

Research, strategize, market, and continuously measure the effectiveness of APIs to meet your SaaS business goals with this practical handbook
Key Features

Transform your APIs into revenue-generating entities by turning them into products
Meet your business needs by improving the way you research, strategize, market, and measure results
Create and implement a variety of metrics to promote growth

Book Description

APIs are crucial in the modern market as they allow faster innovation. But have you ever considered your APIs as products for revenue generation?

API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development.

Of course, it's not all about the product—as any good product manager knows; you need to understand your customers’ needs, expectations, and satisfaction too. Once you've gathered your data, you’ll need to be able to derive actionable insights from it. This is where the book covers the advanced concepts of leading and lagging metrics, removing bias from the metric-setting process, and bringing metrics together to establish long- and short-term goals.

By the end of this book, you'll be perfectly placed to apply product management methodologies to the building and scaling of revenue-generating APIs.
What you will learn

Build a long-term strategy for an API
Explore the concepts of the API life cycle and API maturity
Understand APIs from a product management perspective
Create support models for your APIs that scale with the product
Apply user research principles to APIs
Explore the metrics of activation, retention, engagement, and churn
Cluster metrics together to provide context
Examine the consequences of gameable and vanity metrics

Who this book is for

If you’re a product manager, engineer, or product executive charged with making the most of APIs for your SaaS business, then this book is for you. Basic knowledge of how APIs work and what they do is essential before you get started with this book, since the book covers the analytical side of measuring their performance to help your business grow.
Table of Contents

API as a Product
API Product Management
API Life Cycle and Maturity
Building and Managing API Products
Growth for API Products
Support Models for API Products
Walking in the Customer’s Shoes
Customer Expectations and Goals
Components of API Experience
Infrastructure Metrics
API Product Metrics
Business Metrics
Drawing the Big Picture with Data
Keeping Metrics Honest
Counter Metrics to Avoid Blind Spots
Decision-Making with Data