Many companies born in the digital age instinctively hunt for new innovation and business opportunities everywhere—not just among their own development teams. Likewise, many of the most forward-looking legacy companies realize that to expand the reach of their digital assets, it is important to tap into a wider world of innovation, beyond their corporate walls.
An API product mindset means designing and delivering APIs for long-term value at scale, and evolving them over time to meet changing customer needs. This is in contrast to approaching APIs as one-time projects, or several discrete projects, where they deliver more limited value in terms of extensibility, longevity, and reach.
Application programming interfaces, or APIs, are the de facto mechanism for connecting applications, data, and systems—but they’re also much more.
APIs abstract backend complexity behind a consistent interface, which means they not only allow one kind of software to talk to another, even if neither was designed to do so, but also empower developers to leverage data, functions and other digital assets both more efficiently and in new and novel ways.
Developers have launched new ridesharing services by combining third-party mapping and navigational APIs with their own first-party data and functionality, for example. Many applications rely on third-party APIs, such as those from Twitter or Google, for authentication.
In response to these disconnects between enterprises’ goals and their ability to execute, we launched Apigee Compass, an online tool to help businesses chart a path through their digital transformations. Apigee advocates an outside-in viewpoint that uses customer experiences and expectations to shape strategies, and we’ve invested in a wide range of research projects to understand how companies (successful and not)navigate digital transformation, including our annual “State of APIs” reports and a collaboration with Boston University scholars to study the ROI of API-first digital transformations.