Product Thinking and Product Sense: Conceptualization and Framework to productize APIs

Product thinking is the ability to identify and solve customer problems to create a product that meets their needs. Product sense is the ability to understand what makes a product successful and make decisions to improve it.

An example of product thinking for an API product would be identifying a problem that developers face when using existing APIs, such as a lack of documentation or poor performance. The product manager would then come up with a solution, such as creating an API that has detailed documentation and is optimized for speed.

An example of product sense for an API would be understanding that developers are looking for an API that is easy to use and has a wide range of functionality. The product manager would then make decisions that would improve the API, such as adding more endpoints and simplifying the authentication process.

How do we measure the success of API Product Thinking?

Of late, many views and ideas have been shared on API's graduation as a Product. Though it is a little nascent as a discipline API productization has been in the culture for the last few years. Like every product, we need to measure the success of APIs as a product and need to validate the product thinking with a few criteria.

●?????? Problem statement – Any API product should be able to address the problem statement received from early feedback.

●?????? Business use case – Gone are those days when we used to call API simply an endpoint. It’s become a full-fledged product that requires a proper use case, along with business metrics to justify the use case.

●?????? Adoption and acceptance – It’s important to know how the developer community reacts to products. Higher adoption indicates success, though consistency in adoption is equally important.

●?????? Understand the Total Addressable Market (TAM) – Feedback and interviews are very important while you are building any new product, especially if you are building any abstract product like APIs.

●?????? Growth and monetization – Every product has its own value proposition and growth ratio, measuring the growth vis-a-vis monetization is an important driver point for success metrics.

Understanding product thinking and product sense are equally important to turn an API into a product, both approaches help you to embrace a customer-first vision and use-case specific productization. In the case of API productization, it is very important to become contextual and relevant with use cases.