Product Manager for APIs
What is an API & why is it important?
We live in a different world now. Over the last few decades with the advent of the internet, information sharing between developers of different countries, technology has evolved exponentially. We now can view the same information on different mediums. I will give you 2 examples - First, you can view your health information on the desktop, phone and wearables (like watch). Second, you can view your financial information on the website and the app on your phone. So, you are viewing the same data on the channel of your choice.
Another thing to note, if you ever have issues with your health/financial information, what do you do? You are likely to call the customer support. There again they are will view your data and guide you accordingly. So, as you can see, DATA is the king here. You need to be able to view, read, update and delete data as needed. Tech folks would refer to it as CRUD (Create, Read, Update, DELETE) operations.
API is a component which can be used by various mediums (website/phone etc.) and you can also have permissions associated with it so that only the people with the correct permissions have access to operate and view the data.
Is the role of an API PM different from other PMs?
The short answer is NO for most of the parts. You are still extrapolating the requirements from customers. Conduct discoveries on WHY, WHAT they expect to see and WHERE. You are still trying to understand their pain points.
Another important thing is that we need to meet the user where they want to meet us. In other words, interoperability is very important. You can achieve that by APIs. Many a times, I have seen this scenario occur multiple times wherein users are logging into multiple mediums (eg: more than 2 websites) to do their daily work when it could have been done by logging into one website. It results in a bad workflow for users and slows them down.
Once you understand the pain points, you need to conduct design sprints with your engineers to determine what APIs need to be built. Depending on your organization, if you are NOT a full-stack team then you need to connect with the team that is building the UI to socialize your APIs. You now also have sandbox tools such as swagger, postman etc. where they can try your APIs before implementing it. Think of Sandbox tools as help guides you have for websites or apps. The only difference being that your user base is primarily engineers and platform PMs.
Final Thoughts
Many organizations are now warming up to the idea of interoperability and when you have APIs, you are saving a lot of effort duplication. In other words WITHOUT APIs, if your patient uses the phone, they might see different health information and the customer support team, who uses say a desktop application might see different health information for the same patient. Needless to say that 2 product teams (phone app and customer support team) have duplicated effort. With APIs, we will have DATA INTEGRITY and better allocation of resources!