Manfred will be presenting a related workshop: Practical API Lifecycle Management at APIdays Paris on Tuesday, December 2.
The API lifecycle is made up of four stages, which an API provider would iterate through several times as part of an API program: Plan/Design, Build/Integrate, Operate/Manage, and Share/Engage. You can find a more detailed description of the API Lifecycle in the first post, in which we also describe the Plan/Design stage. Here are posts one, two, and three.
API Lifecycle Stage 4: Share/Engage
The final stage of the API Lifecycle is about creating buzz around the API to increase awareness and adoption. How you define success for increasing adoption — by quantity, quality, or both — will depend on the original goals of the API program. This goes back to what we discussed in the Plan/Design stage: it must be clear why the organization needs an API program and how this contributes to the organization’s objectives. Based on this, metrics for adoption through the Share/Engage stage can differ significantly. There are, however, common principles.
Increasing adoption is achieved via developer marketing or — if you don’t like the term — developer engagement or outreach. Good developer marketing strives to provide outstanding Developer Experience (DX). Pamela Fox contributed a lot to this area.
DX’s basic underlying principles:
Provide clear value to developers; solve an interesting problem with your API
Make it super easy to find and use the API.
The developer marketing roles of an API program contribute to the first principle by staying in touch with the relevant developer communities and passing on feedback to the people who design and build the APIs. What are the developers’ pain points? Developer marketing contributes to the second principle of DX by deploying a developer program, which can vary in formality but will have several core elements.
Core elements of a developer program:
Developer portal: the main entry point to the API, a great measure for this is the TTFHW or “time to first hello world”
Community building: understand your community, know where and how to find them physically and virtually
Evangelists: a very new, diverse and broad role that can be extremely powerful (see the Developer Evangelist’s Onion)
Events: great to get to the word out and to meet community face-to-face, different types of events for different purposes
Communications and social media: strongly related to community building – choose the right channels, means and languages for the right purposes
Pilot partners and case studies: great for early feedback, can be leveraged as success stories about what’s possible with your API
Acceleration via ecosystem partners: leverage your network of partners to accelerate the outreach of your message, but be genuine
Measuring: This is hard, but the more you know about effectiveness of various developer marketing initiatives the better you can react, streamline and focus.
The 3scale model of typical developer program elements
If you cannot implement all of these elements, we recommend to have a minimum configuration that includes: a developer portal, a developer evangelist, and covering relevant events. These three prove to be particularly effective in growing an API’s adoption rate.
Developer evangelists are a very new type of role, which requires a very diverse skill set such as good interpersonal skills, communication skills, and technical/coding skills. A developer evangelist will probably interact with several different teams or units in the organization. Here is an Ignite talk about the developer evangelists role, which you may find useful. If you manage to get a good, motivated evangelist, you are already have way through to creating a vibrant community around your API which will drive adoption.
Additional Resources
An obvious way to increase API awareness is to get it listed in API search engines such as APIs.io, or directories like ProgrammableWeb.
Carlo Longino from WIP recently gave a great talk at the Apps-World conference in London with a lot of useful tips about how to maximize developer adoption. Here is a summary of his talk.
I gave a talk about scaling API programs at the last APIStrat conference in Chicago (September 2014), in which I also covered the Onion Model of Developer Evangelism (includes a video).
These are some of the important aspects to consider related to the fourth and final Share/Engage stage of the API lifecycle. You can find more info about all aspects of the API lifecycle in our resources section. If you’d like to learn more about the 3scale API Management solution, you can ask us for a demo.
About the Crash Course in API Management
As part of our collaboration with Startupbootcamp Berlin, the leading global startup accelerator with a focus on Smart Transportation & Energy, we ran an API Crash Course workshop. The slides are available on SlideShare and embedded at the bottom of this post. In the workshop we introduced the various business benefits of APIs, how these could be leveraged as an organization and gave some examples of successful case studies. In the second part of the workshop, we covered the various stages of the API lifecycle, and introduced best practices and tools for each stage.
We will run a similar workshop at APIdays Paris, December 2.
Below are the slides from the workshop:
API Management Workshop (at Startupbootcamp Berlin) from 3SCALE
3scale API Management Platform