Product Manager Guide for Launching an API Offering Fast 🚀
With the shift to product offerings being extensible to partners, an API as part of your overall product offering is critical to user acquisition growth and embedding within other platforms. But, as your backlog grows every day, how can you launch your API with the least amount of lift and drama — while also delivering a first-class experience? These 4 tools will be rocket boosters 🔥to your roadmap and launch.
1. Great Documentation with Readme.io or GitBook
For another engineering team to walk up to your API and be able to understand your endpoints and your value, Readme.io can be branded and launched in one day to start winning partners. Their Recipes codify use cases simply, the Change Log and Status Page builds trust, and version control is top-notch. GitBook also provides a strong branded offering that will be more polished than a basic Swagger.io setup. (Note: Atlassian Status Page is also great for API health if you do not use Readme.io.)
2. Scalable Machine-to-Machine API Keys with Auth0
With the balanced need for easily giving API keys to partner developers, but also needing top-notch security and scalability, Auth0 is the fastest tool to manage Client ID and API secrets for your offering (see Auth0 documentation). They have amazing documentation, SDKs, and security to check this box and launch fast.
3. No Code / Low Code Developer Portal Experience with Astral.sh
Every Product Manager wants an awesome Developer Portal experience like Stripe or Twilio for partner developers to manage their API keys, add team members, and see metrics — but who has the roadmap to build and maintain all of that? Utilizing Astral.sh can give you no-code branding, API key auth management, user management, add custom pages, and metrics out-of-the-box in one day. Having hand-rolled custom developer portals multiple times in my roadmap with my engineering teams, this tool is a life-saver / roadmap saver.
4. Outsource the Gateway to Kong Gateway or Apigee Gateway
Any hand-rolled internal gateway for managing rate limits and performance will need a roadmap and maintenance as your API scales. For set-it-and-watch-it-infrastructure, utilize industry leaders Kong or Apgiee to remove future stress of tech debt and outages with their straightforward developer-centric solution to make any DevOps team love your product as it scales.
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Are you passionate about “API-first” platforms? If so, hit me up for any tips and learnings as you become the next Stripe, Twilio, Plaid, Alloy, Routable, Modern Treasury, or Alpaca API— changing the world with a few lines of code.
Twitter: @guykirbymonty
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Kirby Montgomery is a post-it note advocate, a coffee glutton, a practitioner of data & design user-centric problem solving, and an extreme prototyper. With experience as an executive product leader at multiple fintech companies, he is on a mission to bring working capital to the world via APIs and embedded finance at C2FO.
