7 Ways API & SDK Solutions Help Product Managers Move Faster
Today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape favors short feedback loops and requires roadmap flexibility to pivot and solve customers’ most pressing problems as they arise. As a result, the best product managers thrive on their ability to move quickly, minimizing time to market for feature releases. This nimble approach to product management directly influences business outcomes, differentiating the most compelling products from lesser competitors and boosting adoption and customer satisfaction along the way.
But no one can achieve such compressed time cycles just by working harder — instead, carefully chosen tools and processes help PMs and their teams gain efficiency. Designed to streamline product development workflows, third-party APIs and SDKs make up one popular and powerful category of such tools. Here’s how working with APIs and SDKs allows PMs (and the engineers they collaborate with) to move faster than ever before.
1. Accelerated Feasibility Analysis, Proof of Concept, & Prototyping
API solutions function out of the box, tend to offer free trials, and can usually be integrated by pasting and modifying just a few lines of code. Even though a polished product launch will eventually require more customization work, product teams can get a hands-on look at the basics of how a given API functions without investing a ton of time or technical resources up front. This allows for more iteration on shorter time cycles and makes it easier to evaluate whether a certain approach adequately solves customers’ problems. The reduced technical uncertainty means PMs can focus on what matters most to them: identifying the right customer problems and solving them the right way at the right time.
2. A Ready-Made Foundation Avoids Reinventing the Wheel
Third-party API and SDK solutions give engineers a reliable, scalable, and highly customizable foundation on which to build new functionality instead of coding it all from scratch. PMs choose these types of modular approaches more and more often for their ability to reduce development time and cost and increase confidence in results. With a proven API, the vendor handles the heavy back-end lifting, so features go from concept to launch in a fraction of the time it would take to develop comparable functionality from the ground up.
Often, enterprise-grade API solutions also come with one or more SDKs to support API integration, including free UI kits that teams can use to speed up front-end integration and design work too, if desired. This all adds up to a classic example of the build vs buy dilemma in action — and with pre-built functionality available in API form, it’s almost always cheaper and faster to buy.
3. Efficient Prioritization of Engineering Resources
From a PM perspective, a company’s most valuable resource is often opportunity cost: If the team allocates x number of sprints to build one thing, what else is being traded away that could’ve been built in the same time frame instead? Combined with other modern product building tips, API solutions help PMs hedge their bets, adding more new features to the roadmap at a lower opportunity cost. A feature built on top of a solid API is more likely to succeed and function as planned, more predictable in terms of the dev time required to integrate it, and less risky to test than a complete in-house build. The boost in efficiency keeps precious engineering resources focused on the core features that differentiate a product instead of diverting those resources to reinvent the wheel.
The issue of dev opportunity cost doesn’t end at launch, either. Most new features will require maintenance and/or expanded functionality to make sure customers are satisfied. That post-launch tail can pull at least some engineering resources away from other important projects indefinitely. API providers, on the other hand, shoulder the burden of keeping things freshly updated and competitive, so PMs can free up resources to build the next big feature.
4. Parallel Development Means More Features, Faster
API solutions naturally fit into an organizational structure in which multiple dev teams work more or less independently of each other. The components they build interact with each other through a limited number of touchpoints instead of being tightly interwoven. This means an update to one feature is less likely to break another, and any roadblocks in one team’s development process are less likely to slow down colleagues on another team. With the scope of each team’s responsibilities appropriately restricted, developers stay focused on their main objectives and achieve their individual goals faster.
5. Decreased Engineering Lead Time
When an engineering team begins a new project, especially if that project involves unfamiliar skills and techniques, a certain amount of lead time is required to research possible approaches and best practices before any real coding gets underway. APIs help reduce that lead time, serving as an abstraction layer with only the most relevant parts exposed to interact with and customize. In other words, a skilled developer can integrate an API solution to achieve desired results without the need to deeply understand every detail of how that API solution works under the hood. Product managers, technical product managers, and solution architects still need to research available APIs to make sure the right product exists to truly meet their needs in terms of scalability, extensibility, and time saved. But once the right solution is identified, integration should be delightfully quick and easy.
6. Cross-Platform Predictability & Consistency
In order to provide a consistent user experience, today’s product development processes must support feature parity across multiple platforms like iOS, Android, web, and desktop. But the more platforms a product needs to support, the more engineering time it takes to build. Each platform presents its own unique challenges and requires a different developer skill set. Organizations that choose to build a feature in-house will need to invest equally in development across each of these platforms or risk delivering an inconsistent experience.
Enterprise-grade API vendors, on the other hand, usually cover all major platforms, with a team of dedicated experts working on each. The API serves as a common backend codebase that a full spectrum of popular frontend languages can interact with. Many API products also come with complete SDK packages that include UI components and associated code in multiple languages, which teams can customize or even implement right out of the box. This added flexibility makes it easier for teams to achieve their goals using their existing expertise instead of seeking out specific talent to match a given project. Knowing they already have the resources they need, PMs can comfortably plan for quick cross-platform development.
7. Support for Multiple Languages, Frameworks, & Existing Tech Stacks
Worthwhile API solutions tend to work with most or all popular coding languages and frameworks, and they also tend to support integration with a variety of existing hardware and software configurations. This means engineering teams can use the language of their choice, like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, or PHP, instead of uprooting their preferences to make a new feature work. It also means that the right API will essentially plug and play with other modular components of the product like features built with different API solutions, existing SaaS integrations, and existing cloud infrastructure and DevOps pipelines.
Choosing the Right API Solution
Reliable API solutions are available for more use cases than ever before, creating a golden age of speed and efficiency for product teams. Still, PMs need to do their due diligence when it comes to evaluating and selecting the right API provider. Usually, this means gaining familiarity with a given category of products and rounding up at least two or three competing solutions to compare against each other and against the all-in-house alternative.
A good PM should have a strong working relationship with the developers who will actually build the feature, and now is the time to ask them what they’ve seen out in the community in terms of available solutions and approaches. Often, they’ll know about a promising API solution that a PM hasn’t discovered yet, and they’ll know what kinds of experiences friends and former colleagues have had with it. Then, once PMs and engineering teams gain confidence in the right API solution, they’re ready to build and ship product faster than ever before.
