We’ve talked to companies about the rise of the API Product Manager and the concept of API as a product for a while now, and we’ve found it's difficult for a lot of organizations because they're focused primarily on the producer side of digital assets and API delivery.
What they're looking at are things like how can we go faster, how can we do things like integrate our DevOps, our CI/CD pipeline with our API delivery. But they're also concerned about the things that a platform team should be concerned about, which is the security of APIs, the policies applied to those APIs, the governance, the performance, the availability, access control, all of those things.
They haven't really focused on APIs as products. Their main concern is the platform as the product; but with an API marketplace, you now have a set of platform tools for the first time for API Product Managers. These are people who have the responsibility for delivering digital products and services for their company, opening up their company’s capabilities to the outside world, or even just allowing people within the organization to access capabilities in a new way to recombine them into new products and services for innovation.
API Product Managers never really had a set of tools to focus on the consumption side of APIs, and the big difference is that with an API product management capability and mindset, you're starting to think about who's consuming the API, what insights can we get?
If you're looking at a monetization strategy, for example, where you want to commercialize some of your world-class products and services, how can we allow these people to see the uptake, for example, or the success or the health of those new products. They could be more innovative and take risks, release more new products than they thought they could.
That's really the difference, that we now have a set of tools to give insights and to allow API Product Managers to promote and market digital assets that are enabled with APIs.
Want to know more? Watch this 30-minute demo to learn how to get the most out of your APIs with a custom, turnkey enterprise API marketplace.
