Product Anonymous Feb 2014 - API management
Published on February 20, 2014
This was a great Product Anonymous session with Jason Corimor of Mashery that covered the business and commercialisation of using APIs, I intend to expand on a few of these topics in the future, so will touch upon them here.
Jason likens discussing APIs with businesses to discussing websites a decades ago, people know what they are, kind of what they’re for and think they want it, but aren’t 100% sure why. Currently discussions around APIs are had with IT departments, when really they should start to be had with business and product owners, thus getting a different perspective and leading to new opportunities.
Mashery has an API management product that sits on top of your web services and helps provide detailed management and analytics for your API and it’s clients / users. As is typical with commercial APIs, this is handled through a key that sets your level of access.
Throughout the session we discussed various aspects of API implementation and the possible outcomes of opening up your data to external sources, these include.
- Gives you the potential to get feedback on your business and processes from external eyes.
- How to protect against being too open and revealing too much.
- How to handle changes in your API policies and plans, see Twitter (badly handled) and Google (typically well handled). This also relates to handling depreciation and redundancy of api functions.
- By utilising standards with APIs no explanation is needed for custom functions, a development team can just take the data source and create with it.
- How to prevent scraping, this is often caused by not making it easy in the first place.
- Don’t rely on an API. Be clear on what the arrangement is with a supplier/client. Think of it like a product, not a solution.
We also had a quick discussion on Hackathons, this is a topic I want to explore much more in the future, but very briefly.
- The resulting products are not always the outcome, it’s about revealing things and the experience people get from the focus for learning or solving problems.
- Don’t just have to be digital.
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