That leaves us in a tricky position where the business sees us as the techie people and our engineering teams think we’re ‘managers’ with no real competent skills in software development.

So what happens when you’re working on a product that is more technical than you might perhaps be comfortable with? What happens if you’re dropped into the deep end and you’re drowning in technical documentation and have no idea what any of it means?

Well, in true product management style, you’re expected to soak it up, learn on the job and get on with it.

Technology skills are part of the holy trinity of PM skills: business, technology, design and there is a strong case both for and against product managers having technical skills. My own personal view is that technical skills are an asset to product managers on the condition that the product manager’s focus remains on delivering the ‘what’ i.e. the value to the customer / business and that the ‘how’ (the technology) is viewed as the mechanism of delivering that value to the customer.

If a product manager had to survive with only 1 skillset, it would not be technical skills. I’d argue that customer empathy, strategy, business, communication and design are more important as core skills, but that technology skills can strengthen decision making, help to understand trade offs and clarify potential business opportunities when used appropriately. Getting involved too deeply into the technology results in an unhealthy focus on the ‘how’ which misses the point of product management entirely.

Introducing APIs

Of all the web technologies, APIs are seemingly more and more important to product managers as more and more products offer APIs which do cool things and open up new opportunities for customer growth and revenue.

In my experience, APIs are one of the most frequent technical concepts referenced by non-product/engineering stakeholders because of the business opportunities they present. An understanding of the fundamentals of APIs is therefore a very useful thing to have.

In this post, we’ll examine what APIs are and what the most important things to learn about APIs are as a product manager so that you can apply some of this knowledge in your daily role as a product person both in your conversations with stakeholders and your engineering team.

Why are APIs important for product managers?





The business case for APIs

APIs open up a whole world of new product and business opportunities. To get the full benefits of these opportunities businesses typically utilise APIs in 3 different ways:

Integrating with third party APIs Building your own APIs for internal use Building and exposing your own APIs to your customers

As product people, I’d argue that we’re more concerned with 1 and 3 since these are where the opportunities for adding value lie. Building APIs for internal use isn’t something I’ve been heavily involved with and is something I’d normally leave to the engineering / architectural teams to decide.

1. Integrating with third party APIs

Connecting with other companies’ APIs allows you and your product to fast track adding features, functionality and tools that would otherwise take you and your team years to build. Chances are that you / your team have worked on integrating with an API at some point. Typically you’ll talk through a feature set and your engineering team will know of an API that will handle the task you need to do via a third party.

Most products today utilise integrations with APIs in one way or another. Here’s a few examples of open APIs that are widely used by millions of websites around the world today:

Braintree API Use cases Process payments for customers

Set up monthly recurring subscriptions for customers Google Maps API Use cases Create a contact us pages with the location pre-determined

Create a transport mobile app which has metro stations on top of Google maps e.g. Citymapper (URL) YouTube API Use cases Embed your favourite YouTube clips into your blog

Allow your users to search for a video on your site using the YouTube Data API Twitter API Use cases Embed your twitter feed into your blog

Create a new tweet using content from your blog

Show a curated stream of tweets based on your hashtag (usually employed by TV channels to show users debating) Shopify API Use cases Mark orders as fulfilled once they’ve shipped

Trigger email communications to customers

Update shipping tracking information when you get a new tracking event

These are all examples of how you can utilise integrations with third party APIs to offer new features and functionality in your products.

To dig a little deeper, let’s use Uber as an example of how multiple sets of APIs can be used in combination to create value propositions for its customers.