API product design essentials

We believe API productization is a critical component in realizing value from your API investments. Productization starts as a mindset yet quickly evolves into both a design strategy and a set of expectations. It is also the basis for establishing an API Lifecycle and shapes your API practice.

What is productization?

Investopedia defines productization as: “To take a new service, product or product feature… and turn it into a standard, fully tested, packaged, supported and marketed product.”

As a topic, productization is too broad to cover in this article but there are a few essential aspects relevant to our API CX discussion:

• Empathy: Empathize with consumer needs in your target market – products that don’t address a pain point generally fail
• Business value: Does the value generated exceed upfront and operating costs
• CX: Consumer experience can dramatically amplify or attenuate adoption
• Intuitive design: Consumers despise having to ask for support – make your product self-evident
• Cost efficiency: Providing consumer support has a high cost (e.g. $, time, missed opportunities, etc.) – see item 2
• Marketing: Consumers need to know a product exists and what it does before they will use it – your product needs to be intentionally marketed
• Instruction: Even the most elegant products provide consumers with essential instruction – failure to do so will result in lower adoption & higher support costs

This set of concepts combined becomes the basis for:

• Creating potential value for both consumers and your company
• Realizing value through practices that lead to discovery & adoption by consumers
• Ensuring a positive return on investment

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