I’ve been crisscrossing the country talking about the business of APIs during our second annual U.S. city tour. With about half our stops complete, I wanted to share some observations with the community.
My big takeaway: awareness of and expertise in using APIs to do business has become mainstream among our attendees. Questions are less about “why digital” or “why APIs” and much more focused on “how can you help us do what we already know we want to do?”
I had lunch with a technology team who knew APIs inside and out and had come for the demo to see if Apigee’s platform fit the bill for where they were headed (some compliments from this super-savvy group felt good). I spoke with two people from a corporate strategy team who’d come to get a deeper view of the technology behind platform strategies they already had in mind (once again, specifically including the product demo).
And my favorite comment was from one attendee during Q&A with Brian Pagano (@bpagano) —who was himself a CTO and Apigee customer before becoming an Apigeek: “I want to record all your one-liners” so I can use them to make the case in my company.
The two most common scenarios I’ve seen among attendees are:
I’ve adapted my presentation to provide “tools they can use” rather than telling them something they already know. I’ve been talking about the concept of a flywheel bottom-up and top-down:
While I can’t claim to always offer one-liners that are as pithy as my colleague Brian Pagano’s (@bpagano), we’ve had good conversations during the tour about how to make the most of each flywheel and get them to click together like well-oiled gears.
What do you think: Are APIs becoming the de facto choice in your organization from the bottom up? Is digitalization strategy that meaningfully affects the bottom line being articulated at the top? Are both happening but not yet fully aligned?
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