Measuring & Selling the Success of your API Program

[apaterson]

@jrethans @Michael Leppitsch @awhite @Birute Awasthi- keen for your thoughts

A successful API program should achieve a few things for your organization. It should help your organization be better able to react in our evolving digital world, but it should also be a strong proof point that can be leveraged to ensure further support for API development initiatives. Being able to demonstrate and then sell the success of an API program is critical to building greater internal support, empowering the digital champions in your company and adding to your personal career story.

If this is the first such program for your organization, it is important to use it to do something small but meaningful for your business. In selling the success of your program, it is important that your API program makes an impact, so our advice is to start with something small but core to your organization’s activities. This will also help ensure the contribution of your program aligns with the organization’s overall goals.

Research conducted by Apigee¹ in 2013 clearly demonstrated that Top Digital Performers ensured internal alignment between Marketing and IT measures.

When considering what the best metrics for measuring the impact of your specific piece of work, ensure there is a clearly articulated link to the organization’s strategic goals and business KPIs. Note this does not necessarily mean that your measure must ultimately drive a financial KPI on revenue or margin. Other key business metrics should focus on customer satisfaction or organizational efficiency; indeed a successful API program should have demonstrated impact in one of these areas of measure.

Some common metrics in our experience and their mappings to business KPIs follow:

Service Re-Use	=>	Organizational Efficiency
Time to Market	=>	ROI
Asset Utilization	=>	Customer Satisfaction, ROI
Reduce Response Time	=>	Customer Satisfaction, Organizational Efficiency
Introduce New Feature x	=>	Customer Satisfaction, ROI

When selling the success of your program, it is useful to understand your audience. You will want to ensure your message reaches your business leaders as well as key stakeholders who are impacted by your program: consult your stakeholder map. When drafting communications remember to set the context of this achievement as part of the organization’s overall digital journey. Be succinct but articulate how the measured outcomes drive the organization’s wider goals. Finally set the stage for further development: show how this success creates further opportunities to power your business with APIs.

And if you should fall short of reaching the expectations you previously set for success, demonstrate how the learning from this program is now helping inform next steps in your digital journey. Remember that as an organization increases it’s digital agility, the opportunity to fail fast and redirect quickly will further ensure future successes.

Resources

• 1.Apigee Institute: Three ROI Criteria to Drive Digital Success – June 2013
• 2.KPIs for APIs - Oct 2014
• 3.Apigee API Health