Your API Roadmap Helps Others Tell Stories About Your API

There are many reasons you want to have a roadmap for your API. It helps you communicate with your API community where you are going with your API. It also helps you have a plan in place for the future, which increases the chances you will be moving things forward in a predictable and stable way. When I’m reviewing an API I don’t see a public API roadmap available, I tend to give them a ding on the reliability and communication for their operations. One of the reasons we do APIs is to help us focus externally with our digital resources, which communication plays an important role, and when API providers aren’t communicating effectively with their community, there are almost always other issues right behind the scenes.

A road map for your API helps you plan, and think through how and what you will be releasing for the foreseeable future. Communicating this plan externally helps force you think about your roadmap in the context of your consumers. Having a roadmap, and successfully communicating about it via a blog, on Twitter, and other channels helps keep your API consumers in tune with what you doing. In my opinion, an API roadmap is an essential building block for all API providers, because it has direct value on the health of API operations, but because it also provides an external sign of the overall health of a platform. https://goo.gl/fGVDhA #DataIntegration #ML

Examining Mature APIs (Slack, Stripe, Box)

ICYDK: In our previous blog post, we discussed the disconnect between API pricing plans where you pay monthly for a set number of calls and regular developer use cases. We think competition will drive new pricing models that are more developer friendly – and a potential approach could be charging for calls based on their business value. Examining webhook events available via API from Stripe, Slack, and Box gives us a forward look into how this could work.

What’s a Mature API?

Forbes nicely summarizes where they see API development going in this graphic (ignore the “customer-driven platform revolution”) portion: https://goo.gl/CkuoWj #DataIntegration #ML