The producer and consumer life cycle
As a producer of an API, it is often easy to forget that a development cycle on the customer’s side is required to integrate with the APIs you produce. Unlike a mobile app or a website, the user experience of an API involves a developer or a team of developers being able to discover, evaluate, integrate, and scale their usage of the API. Depending on how easy or difficult your API is to use, and whether you provide tools to minimize the effort needed, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few months.
Like every product, API products need a healthy flow of customer feedback to keep the customer’s experience as the top priority for product development so that the APIs can be improved over time and made better for customers. To achieve a continuous flow of feedback in API development, teams create customer feedback loops via support teams that enable the customer feedback and pain points to be recorded and reported back to...
