Our February session focused on product-tising APIs and our speaker, Jason Cormier from Mashery, has put together the following post in case you missed anything.

You can also check out Chris Chinchilla’s summary of the night.

Take it away Jason…

Product Managers: Start Taking Control of Your API Strategy

Let me take you back some 15 or so years ago. The Internet was in its infancy, and the World Wide Web was something mysterious and scary for most people, let alone businesses to think about. Getting yourself online required getting off your land line telephone first.

There were trailblazers of course, those who saw the potential of a new emerging technology and put the first commercial websites online. It was a technical challenge, but they succeeded. They invented the blink tag, the splash page, the shopping cart. E-commerce was born.

During these early years, almost all websites were built and managed by people who worked in IT departments who answered to the strange and slightly kinky sounding title of Webmaster. Eventually however, the power and influence of the technology was recognized as being too valuable and important to the business. Marketing and Product Managers took control and we haven’t looked back since.

You wouldn’t let your IT department plan and run your website strategy today. Yet in most companies, history seems to be repeating itself when it comes to their APIs.

It’s understandable of course, since you may not even know what an API is, let alone why as a Product Manager you MUST own the strategy for APIs within your business. But rest assured, much like the World Wide Web 15 years ago, APIs today present a wide open playing field for businesses to embrace a new emerging technology trend. Whether you act or not there are already trailblazers leading the way, some of whom are likely to become your future competitors.

First, the basics: What is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s a technology protocol that enables disparate systems talk to each other, and share information. Think of it like a system of security doors you put in front of your most valuable data, making it accessible only to those who have been given a key.

For example, imagine your business has a proprietary digital storage service that you use to archive important documents. Perhaps you decide to develop a mobile app that requires access to those documents. If your storage service has an API, it makes it easy for the app to access your data. The app is given a unique key, which it uses to request access to documents whenever needed. The API recognizes the key and gives the app access to the documents. Pretty simple, right?

Well, to be fair this analogy is pretty basic. There is a LOT more to APIs of course, it’s a complex piece of technology. And at some point before any API roll out someone has to make decisions about things like data structures, object classes, protocols, authorization tokens, proxies, caching, and more. Given this, you can see why most APIs are currently managed by IT departments. However if you take a step back, if you think like a Product Manager and consider the potential of this technology and what it can do for your business, how it can power your products, how you can better enable external partnerships… you’ll forget about the specs and start to focus on why APIs have the potential to be one of your most valuable commercial drivers.

Value of APIs as a Product

No matter who you work for today your business has digital assets of some kind, from which you are already extracting value. There are 3 main types of assets that are suitable for sharing:

1. Content: Consumable information, ex. FoxSports live stats feed, Lonely Planet city overviews, etc.
2. Services: Functionality, ex. Telstra SMS services, Dimmi restaurant booking engine, etc.
3. Data: Your internal business metrics, ex. units sold over time by location to whom, customer profiles, etc.

I can guarantee you that no matter what you are currently doing with these assets in your business, there are ways to extract even more value from them. And the key to optimizing the value of your assets is to make them easier to access, via APIs.

What kind of value?

When you have easy, fast access to your assets you can do things like:

Build and iterate your own products much faster.  Has your website team built a new search feature? Your mobile apps team can get access to it immediately via the API.   For example, Comcast now roll out new features across their products in just 30 minutes when it used to take months. Check out the Comcast success story & webinar where the Senior Director of Product Development & Technology and a Senior Engineer talk about the change and benefits.

Better business intelligence.  Want to know which products on which platforms are drawing on your assets most frequently? When everything goes through a single API it’s easier to track.  Sensis track all the advertiser impressions generated on their own products AND a range of 3rd party products via their APIs. More on how Mashery helped Sensis.

Facilitate strategic partnerships.  Want to see your brand integrated into 3rd party products?  It’s as easy as giving them their own API key. Fantasy sports platform, SportData was able to syndicate out to channel partners like Google and Facebook quickly and easily by providing access to their APIs. See how it drives results and ROI.

Introduce new revenue streams.  If your assets are valuable to you, maybe they’re valuable to others as well? With APIs you can commercialize your assets by selling access. Choice Hotels are using Mashery technology to assist in generating additional booking revenue via the 6000+ partners they service via their APIs.

There are a myriad of ways you can create and manage your APIs, and that’s definitely something you will need to work with your IT teams to define eventually. But don’t let yourself get lost in those details too early, as can sometimes happen. Focus first on what business goals you as a Product Manager seek to deliver. Hopefully you’re starting to see now, that by treating your API services like a product, you are effectively creating a service platform. A platform that empowers you to make business decisions and take action, without having to engage your IT team to build you something new every single time.

What does a successful API platform look like?

A successful API platform will look like rapid prototyping and faster innovation on the product ideas you have now, preparation and readiness for unknown future opportunities, and a willingness to open yourself up and let others carry some of the burden and risk. It’s not something all companies are necessarily comfortable with –  not even Google.

I’ll leave you with a link to the infamous leaked memo issued by Google employee Steve Yegge, who roundly criticized Google for failing to recognize the importance of APIs as a platform back in 2011:

 “Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.”

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Jason Cormier is the Director of Strategy and Business Development for Mashery in Australia. Mashery works with over 200 brands worldwide to help them manage their APIs in order to build new revenue channels, speed time-to-market, and spur innovation. Find out more at www.mashery.com

Our next event on the 20th of March is all about the skills needed to master UX!  Really, you ask?  Yes really!

The fabulous Matt Magain, co-founder of UX Mastery and the fabulous Fox Woods, freelance user experience architect and co-founder of Girls Club Melbourne, will look at the 5 skills required for UX mastery and how to incorporate them whether you have a UX team to work with or if you’re the sole UX representative.

They will talk about what skills UX experts specifically bring to your team and which skills product managers may already have and can hone further.  They will share practical exercises for improving these skills.

Note the new location:  The Governor’s Lounge, Royal Melbourne Hotel is just off the corner of Bourke & Spencer (almost directly across from previous location of the Mail Exchange Hotel).

Time: 6-6:30pm arrival & drinks. Talk starts at 6:30pm. We wrap up about 8pm.

This month we have Jason Cormier from Mashery talking about APIs.   His session is entitled ‘Your APIs are so product ready, it hurts’.   We’ll be at the Mail Exchange at 6p for a 630p start on Thursday Feb 20th.    RSVP now!

And our afternoon coffee will be the following Thursday, the 27th, at Brunetti’s at City Square (Swanston & Flinders Ln).   We’ll be there from 2-3pm.   RSVP now!

You can just turn up for any of our events but we appreciate it when you RSVP as it gives us an idea re: how big of a table to grab at coffee or organising space at Mail Exchange.

The first session for 2014, will be a book club session.  

The book we will be reviewing is Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath. Don’t worry, you don’t have to read it to enjoy/come to the session, but if you do wish to get a copy at Amazon (ebook is available) – here’s the link*: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

This book and its content follows on from our session on Decision making in June last year, which Steve then put together a series of posts diving in deeper to the issues he raised during his session.  You can find the start of the series here and there are six articles in total.

The main treatise of the book is about the psychology behind the decision making process.  The great thing thing about the Heath brothers work, is they provide real insight into ways to actually start doing better at our own decision making and helping others to do so as well.  As product managers this type of influence is critical to what we do.

If you would prefer the cheat sheet reading approach, check out some of Teresa Torres‘ articles about this book and the elements that resonate for her and product management.  We will take a look at some of this work as well during the session.

January 23rd meet-up: Book club on Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath. Start time 6pm, for 6:30pm kick-off, at the Mail Exchange Hotel, back room behind the Restaurant area. Bourke and Spencer st.
RSVP below or click this button to go to Eventbrite for full details

*testing an affiliate link so if you buy via this link Product Anonymous will get something like 10c which will go towards hosting costs.

We have 2 more events before the end of the year so hope to see you – at least once!!

This month’s evening event is our annual social. There’s no speaker, no specific topic – it’s just all about chatting, catching up, talking product management (or not) and getting to know each other better. It’s also Product Anonymous’s 2nd birthday!!!!

This year our end of year social is Thursday Nov 21st at the Sahara bar on Swanston st. Sign up here: 

And then we’ll finish off the year with an afternoon coffee on Thursday Nov 28th, 2-3pm, City Square by Brunetti’s. Drop in any time when you can, we will be there the whole hour. Sign up here: 

The IDEO +Acumen+ HCD course is a do-it-yourself group course which in 6 weeks runs you through the entire IDEO design process for Human Centred Design. The course is sponsored in Australia by +Acumen, which is an organisation that helps people self-learn.

We had a big crowd for this session, and when circling the table to see what attracted people we had about a third who had done the course and were interested in unpacking it with others who had done the course and a third who had experience in human centred design and the last third interested in understanding the value of doing the course themselves.  It was a good mix of people to encourage good discussion throughout the presentation.

IDEO’s design process covers three areas: Discover, Ideate and Prototype.  Within each of these areas there are levels which are quite important breakdowns of the process.  By understanding these smaller elements, you begin to get an appreciation for a robust and repeatable process, which still has the flexibility and room for customisation to be applied to any project.

Includes the sub-steps in each of the stages of Discover, Ideate and Prototype

The Discover phase can iterate between research and context for a time until you are comfortable you know what you are pursuing before moving onto the Ideate stage.  Within Ideate, you can progress along – whilst repeatedly revising your direction – until the point where you consider heading towards Prototyping.  As we were on a course, we followed a VERY linear path, but those who had experience with this approach called out that you might stay in an area of focus for a long period until it was right or you might be very structured but repeat from start to finish each week.  It depends on the project, the team and the overall goals you may have when applying this approach.

It was a great part of the discovery to understand the more discreet steps within each area and learn ones strengths and weaknesses at each.  For example getting out there and just asking people questions was hard to get going, but once you started and found that people are amazingly open and willing to share their thoughts it got easier.

One of the complaints regarding the course was that it took far more time than indicated. One of the group at the session didn’t complete it as they struggled to keep momentum going after 6 or 7 weeks and not being in sight of finishing.  The group I was with came very close to giving up, but we managed to rally to get to the finish line.  We also made a conscious decision to skip some elements in order to see out the course to the end.

Once my group got to the brainstorming stage we as a group had one of our best grok moments of the course.  We found that it wasn’t so hard to generate ideas, by having everyone think out loud so we could build off each other – the faster we shared “conventional” ideas the quicker we got to better ideas.  Once we were done it was quite easy to spot the good stuff.  With only the option to score on achievable and innovative and one vote per person per criteria the “winners” bubbled up quickly.  This methodology for group focus on progressing ideas to prototyping was fabulous.

The last stage was Prototyping and I must admit I thought we would immediately start to build and kind of get creative right away.  I was impressed with this stage having a scientific approach that ensured you tested an idea rather than the whole product.  The user experience map was a great way to break it up into small achievable steps, whilst at the same time understanding your goals and vision for an end state product or service.

A photo of our experience map done during our Prototyping workshop

This was the moment this course struck gold for me for as a product manager.  I think these elements are used commonly in product management (testing, revising, build at “story” level) but the insight here was that you need to test a step in the user experience before committing to the whole product.  The other insight was that prototyping does not need to be such an expensive fully designed product, but something light (easy to throw away!) such as a story, a diagram or an ad.  These options allow for prototyping without development and can be really useful at many stages of the product management lifecycle.

As Steve highlighted, even before you have a team, and before you have money, and when you need to make the case for the business case this no cost prototyping brings the validation to get your next idea across the line.

Some additional thoughts are called out in the deck below. Please feel free to add your comments or questions below if you have done the course or have your own experiences with this methodology.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been overseas the last few months – mostly in Shanghai. Being in a new city with such a different culture to my own (even my adopted cultures), I found I was constantly asking ‘why’ on a very regular basis.

I was taking mandarin classes learning how to ask ‘what’ and ‘where’ but what I really wanted was to ask ‘why’. I kept seeing all sorts of scenarios where I wanted to ask ‘why’! For example, why do some foods need to be wrapped in layer upon layer of plastic wrap when meat was available for sale unrefridgerated on a cardboard table?

Although even after I learned the word for ‘why’ – wèishéme – I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand the answers (my mandarin has improved but it’s very much a work in progress!). I became a little obsessed with wèishéme and it got me thinking about asking the question in product management.

Whether we’re talking with a customer or end user, determining which feature to build next or how to market our product, understanding the ‘why’ is needed to help us connect, make our products great and create success. Understanding ‘why’ uncovers the value and explains why we care, what the context is, influences us and focuses on the problem (not the solution).

We can integrate ‘why’ into our existing tools like positioning statements, interviews & research, and even agile stories.

Some of the references include:

Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ TED talk & the golden circle

Bill DeRouchey’s ‘Power of Why’ deck on slideshare

Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

I’d also recommend The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. It didn’t make it into the deck but is an excellent read.

IDEO and Acumen offered the chanced to do an online course on IDEO’s human centred design process.  All you needed was a bit of time and at least one other person to sign-up with.  I gathered a group of fellow product managers and Product Anon attendees and we signed up to give it a go and learn more about this leading process for innovation.  They will join me for the session to share from their point of view as well.  

This month’s session will be on how we found the course, what we learnt, how we will try and fit it back into our Product management worlds, and how we will keep our minds open. If you took the IDEO/Acument course, please come along and share your experiences.

The usual location – Mail Exchange Hotel on the corner or Bourke St and Spencer st.  This is the last topic event before we have our end of year Product Bash. Sign up here.

October is Bring a Buddy month!!! Do you have a friend, co-worker or colleague from a previous job who you think might be interested in Product Anonymous? Someone who has asked about the group but never comes along? We’ve heard from some people that they’d like to attend but don’t know anyone at Product Anonymous … so they don’t attend. This month, think about who you know would be interested in the group or topic and bring them along! Be a buddy!

At Thursday’s meeting, it was suggested we host a monthly coffee so we’re giving it a go this week.   Thursday Oct 3rd from 2-3pm in the CBD.  Location details below.

The idea came as an alternative for people who can’t attend in the evening and/or want more than just 1 time a month to talk about product management.

Our evening events have time to meet people & chat although we always have a topic for discussion.  With the coffee session, it’s purely all coversation on whatever topic you want.

We hope to see you there!  We’d love your feedback on this idea too!

Thursday Oct 3rd at Captains of Industry at 2 Somerset Place Lvl 1 from 2-3pm.   We’ll have some sort of signage to indicate Product Anonymous (ie showing our logo).

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