API Helmsmen: Why Do API Product Managers Hold the Key?

The API Economy as Another Engine for Business Growth. APIs can leverage a company's unique, segmented, or core functions for rapid experimentation and profit generation. API leaders need to understand the needs of customers and internal users, making API products attractive through design, testing, and feedback.

This article will showcase, through a case study, that API product managers are essentially the helmsmen of the API economy, influencing the success of a company's API strategy. For some businesses, APIs are central to their value proposition, and the success of API products can determine the company's survival.

Quick Recap: What is an API Product?

An API is a simple, direct tool that helps companies showcase their unique services and products to the world. When APIs have budgets, roadmaps, monetization strategies, and designated product managers, they become API products, no different from any other tangible or intangible products developed by companies today.

"API products must necessarily emerge as SaaS technologies driven by APIs, where APIs are the sole carriers of value."

Quick Recap: What is an API Product Manager?
The primary responsibility of an API product manager is to clearly articulate the product's value and benefits to internal stakeholders and end-users, helping the organization formulate the vision and strategy for API products.

An important skill for an API product manager is business acumen—they must balance various relationships and demands between business and output, with the ultimate goal of profitability for the company.

The most critical skill for an API product manager is connecting APIs with product thinking, merging technology with product management, much like a tangible product manager rather than an internet product manager.

"One of the biggest challenges for API product managers is ensuring APIs deliver value to a broad group of stakeholders:

• Developers who create and maintain APIs, adding new features and fixing issues.
• Partner developers using APIs within strategic business relationships.
• Third-party developers with access to public APIs.
• Customers relying on APIs for efficient online business operations.
• Executives."

Case Study: AI-Generated Content Integration Platform
APIs for AI writing, AI image generation, AI intelligent Q&A, and AI translation are the most mature functions of AIGC. Different platforms excel in different environments—for example, ChatGPT's English AI writing quality far surpasses domestic products, while KimiGPT's Chinese AI writing readability is superior to foreign products. Therefore, businesses need a no-code AI integration platform to define and run their AI writing API processes.

How to Implement This API Product Strategy:

1. First, understanding the big picture is crucial. Why are APIs so important to your business model? Why are APIs the right delivery system for your business value? How will they delight your customers?

2. Second, consider the value proposition of the API from three perspectives:

   • What can the API do for people?
   • Specifically, who will use the API? What are their needs?
   • What other companies are operating in this field? How does your API compare?

3. Finally, determine the development process.

4. Draft the API product PRD, covering the following content:

   • Business justification
   • User personas
   • Clear use cases
   • Positioning and competitive intelligence
   • Roadmap
   • Monetization strategy
   • Pre- and post-launch plans
   • Marketing and sales channels
   • Support and documentation
   • Security

Answer to Question 1: Global Definition
The target customers for the AI-generated content integration platform are businesses. The problem it solves is integrating AIGC capabilities into business systems via API interfaces, avoiding the need for employees to generate content in application interfaces and then copy it, thus improving work efficiency. Additionally, by recording the interaction process with AI, businesses can continuously improve prompts and enhance generation quality.

In this business model, API products are the only choice, and delivering capabilities through a SaaS technology platform is the most cost-effective approach in the early stages of business development. It is also the lowest-cost option for customers.

Answer to Question 2: Defining Value
The digital software development team of the target customer is responsible for the company's digital efficiency. Integrating high-quality AIGC capabilities is a key responsibility. Compared to self-research, the AIGC integration platform offers many advantages to the digital team, such as not needing to research each major model's API interface and technical details, develop process engines and AI adapters, study open-source model deployment issues, or develop usage tracking and data analysis systems for major models.

The ultimate value is as follows:

Answer to Question 3: API Product Development Process
We will adopt an agile development model, defining only one API interface, "AI Writing API," and issuing this interface through the API market (initially not building our own API portal and store). We will gradually improve the overall API product process and then add APIs for AI translation, AI image generation, AI intelligent Q&A, AI video generation, and more.

Answer to Question 4: API Product PRD
The API product PRD is similar to traditional product documentation, with some differences highlighted here:

1. API Security
   AIGC products themselves do not involve privacy or intellectual property issues. The only risk point is the "cultural taboos or language politics" in different language environments. In designing this product, we invested heavily in researching "AIGC's political avoidance," which is crucial for large enterprises, especially those with multinational operations and employees of various faiths.

2. API Pricing Model
   The AIGC integration platform adopts a unified traffic pricing model, where customers do not need to pay attention to the prices of various AI major model channels or pay separate technical service fees. This model is simple for customers to calculate and allows for more flexible switching of backend AI major model channels. Compared to purchasing each channel separately, it is more flexible and has a superior overall cost-performance ratio.

3. API Marketing

   • Phase one: Promote in the API market and find seed customers through acquaintances.
   • Phase two: Build an API portal, focusing on content SEO marketing and SEM.
   • Phase three: Establish a sales team to provide sales services for major customers.

4. API Product Market Documentation
   Initially, use Explinks's integrated API product market assistant to generate API market documentation, API interface documentation, API docking manuals and quick docking guides, API market PPT documents, and more.

The API Product Manager as the Helmsman
From the case study above, we can conclude the following points:

• Technical experts are better suited to become API product managers. Without technical knowledge, it is impossible to design API products.
• The complexity of API products lies beyond the gateway.
• The pricing model of API products affects product logic, customer experience, sales, gross margin, etc.
• API product marketing requires an internet mindset.
• The way customers use APIs determines the quality of API products, impacting the company's reputation and potentially leading to compensation disputes.

Isn't such an API product manager indeed the helmsman?

What Can Explinks Do for API Product Managers?

• API Product Demand Research Assistant: Explinks’s API platform gathers a large number of developers, simplifying the API product manager's market demand research work. Like crowdfunding, you can document first, then develop the product.
• API Product Documentation Assistant: Simplifies the writing of product documentation.
• API Interface Documentation Assistant: Simplifies the writing of API interface documentation, automates the generation of API client SDKs, and more.
• API Promotion Assistant: Provides Explinks's API platform promotion function, community self-promotion, content self-promotion, and other functions.
• API Trial Assistant: Uses Explinks's API platform trial function to find seed test users in the early stage and as a means of discovering target users in the later stage.
• API Communication Assistant: Uses Explinks's API platform interaction function to communicate requirements with developers and resolve bugs promptly.