Building and scaling your API community
In order to thrive and prosper in today's digital economy more and more companies are actively developing and rolling out APIs around their capabilities and sharing them with a wider community. In an age where the paradigm has shifted from "The big eat the small" to "The fast eat the slow", it has become paramount for companies across all industries to drive digital innovation using an API based approach.
Introducing the API strategy blueprint
In order to be successful with an API led approach, however, it is critical for companies to regard APIs as products and treat them that way using an end to end strategy - something we call the API strategy blueprint. It consists of four primary stages:
- Establishing a digital strategy by articulating business outcomes, determining the target audience and building a long term journey map around it
- Aligning a company's organisation and culture around this approach through building skills, driving adoption and democratising innovation
- Evaluating and building the required technology stack from a conceptual level down to the actual implementation
- Engaging the ecosystem through a vibrant community and doubling down on evangelism and marketing
Many companies focus their activities on the third point - building the required technology stack - and tend to spend less time on the other three items. This is somewhat understandable since companies are pressured for time in dealing with challenges from competitors and tend to face budget shortages when rolling out new capabilities. So the focus is on the technology stack and quickly rolling out new projects - and less on the governance around it.
Engaging the Ecosystem
Especially the last point of the API strategy blueprint - Engaging the Ecosystem - is a critical factor that sometimes gets overlooked. And when it gets addressed, then it usually happens through a quick fix, such as building a simple portal, a content management system and a couple of social engagement tools to drive API adoption in true "fish where the fish are" fashion.
But engaging the ecosystem is much more than that - it actually encompasses a strategy to drive a community of users and stakeholders that goes beyond just documenting APIs on a website. It is also about companies creating customised digital experiences that promote API products, support API ecosystems and increase engagement between developers, partners and employees.
And once companies become more engaged in the production and rollout of software, the more important it will be to understand the diverse nature of the ecosystem. They could be partners and developers utilising the APIs for their own third party solutions, or end customers who are interacting with core business processes through various channels.
API Community Management
From a technological point of view, a solution supporting the community and ecosystem should consist of the following capabilities - amongst others - to fully support the ecosystem:
- Community collaboration through forums, gamification, chat and case management capabilities that increase developer engagement
- A set of several API portals that a tailored to specific audiences and personalise their experience
- Business metrics that define and measure ecosystem engagement, such as. cost savings, revenue generated and most popular APIs
- Sandboxing capabilities to trial APIs
And this combined set of API community capabilities need to be realigned with the wider API strategy blueprint defined at the beginning in order to drive value for the organisation.
Feel free to talk to me about how MuleSoft can assist you in engaging your ecosystem and scaling your API community.
In our partnership with Salesforce we have been very active in addressing the community aspect of our customers' API strategy through our API Community Manager product.
Daniel Soffner
Senior Customer Success Architect
MuleSoft, a Salesforce company, Melbourne
