Notes from the Road: API City Tour 2016 Part 1

bkirschner
Participant I

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:

  • We’re going to do something new, and an API-centric approach seems to be the way to go
  • We’ve been taking an API-centric approach, and now we need a platform to manage them at scale.

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:

  • APIs are a flywheel. Once you create and deploy a great API for a project use-case, you’ve created an option to create new mash-ups at little or no marginal cost across team or firm boundaries. The best way to get started is to deploy—and time again, we’ve seen that lead to unanticipated use cases and more APIs.
  • “Digitalization” is a flywheel. As more and more companies state their thesis for how and why digital will drive growth in their CEO’s annual letter to shareholders or investor day briefings, it becomes very hard for peer company CEOs not to do the same.

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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