i love apis 2015: how to grow and measure your api program
TRANSCRIPT
I ❤ APIs OCTOBER 13, 2015
How to Grow and Measure Your API Program
Andrew Mager, Developer Advocate @MAGER
• 1997 - lespaul.com
• 2005 - Planet Blacksburg
• 2006 - ESPN
• 2007 - CNET
• 2010 - SimpleGeo
• 2011 - Spotify
• 2014 - SmartThings
• 2015 - Postmates
Who am I?
Spotify NYC, 2012
How do you start an API program?
London Music Hack Day, 2012
• How is your API unique?
• What is the purpose of
your API? • Commercial • Partner/Private • Experimental/
Research/Government
• Who do you want to use
your API?
• Tell the world with a great
developer website.
Birth of an API
Music Education Hack Day, New York 2013
How do you grow your API program from nothing to
something?
• Product owner of the API
• Developer experience • Tools, libs, changelog
• Education • Docs, tuts, workshops
• Partnerships/BD
• Marketing & community
• Internal advocate
What does a developer
advocate do?
Music Hack Day Edinburgh, 2012
How do you find a developer advocate?
• Socially fluent • Fosters community • Clear, coherent speaking • Willingness to learn • Patience • Eagerness to teach • Technical • Empathetic • Lack of ego • Readily available • Inspirational • Time management • Product management • Fun
Skills of a great
developer advocate
Tim Falls, keen.io
The best developer advocate might already work at your
company.
• Logical, inventive, pragmatic. • Always looking for the next big
problem to solve. • Learning new technologies
constantly. • Testing the limits. • Independent, sometimes
stubborn. • Day jobs feed their weekend
hack ideas. • Short attention-span. • More than a developer, many
personalities.
Understanding the hacker
ethos
Music Hack Day NYC, 2012
• Add them on Github, DevPost,
Lanyrd, Github, Twitter,
Dribbble, and even LinkedIn. • Engage again and again. • Encourage them to contribute to
open source projects. • Send them monthly
newsletters. • Vote up and answer on Stack
Overflow. • Invite them to all types of
events. • Offer office hours. • Continue their hacks.
How to flirt with a
developer online
The (not too distant) Future
• Parse - https://www.parse.com/customers • Twilio - https://www.twilio.com/showcase/ • Uber - https://developer.uber.com/showcase/ • Stripe - https://stripe.com/gallery • Google Maps - https://developers.google.com/maps/showcase/ • Keen.io - https://keen.io/#stories • Apple Watch - http://www.apple.com/watch/apps/ • YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/yt/dev/showcase.html • Facebook - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/showcase • Pebble - http://developer.getpebble.com/examples/ • Spotify - https://developer.spotify.com/showcase/ • Github - https://github.com/showcases • Android Developer Stories - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r36OJaeMo4
Showcase projects built using your API
How do you measure the success of your API?
• Monthly active API users • Daily API calls • Apps/projects published • Pull requests/forks/stars • Website analytics • Social media • Email signups • Partners • Meetup attendees • Hacks created • Swag given out • Feedback reported • Beers consumed
Success by the numbers
Way Out West Hack 2013, Göteborg, Sweden
What about the metrics you can’t track?
• Developer happiness • Event interaction • Word of mouth • Good will in the community • Time spent hacking offline
Measuring the unmeasurable
HackMIT, 2015
THANK YOU!
Questions?
@PostmatesDev http://postmates.com/developer
@mager (Twitter, Github, Instagram) http://mager.co