Welcome along to the second episode of the Tyk podcast, All About APIs. This show is all about taking a deep dive into the world of APIs and getting up close to the issues and opportunities they present.
Putting the developer experience under the spotlight
In our second podcast episode, SPS Commerce’s Travis Gosselin shares his insights into DevX-powered API-led product growth. We explore what the developer experience entails and share some best practice Dos and Don’ts.
As Travis points out, this means stepping back and looking at how developers work and how they interact with the myriad of tools that support them:
“How does the developer get their work done? Well, developers work in rainforests, not planned gardens. We don’t have time to curate planned gardens of all the different tools and how they’re going to interact the way we want because we’re busy delivering value from our delivery teams. And so, born out of this jungle, different trees that are kind of popping up all over the place. And that’s a problem.
“We need to step back and figure out how we plan this out. How do we take a much more engineering (centred) approach to our development experience than we have in the past?”
Bringing benefits to all
A good developer experience doesn’t just benefit developers; it can free up their time and enable them to enjoy their work, and that can underpin business growth. Travis explains:
“We don’t want to be fighting with the process. We don’t want to be fighting with the tools. We want to be productive. We want to actually build things that last, that scale, that are things we can be really proud of, and we’re going to invest our energies into doing.”
How the developer experience leads to growth
We also share some insights into how the developer experience impacts API-led product growth and why it’s so important. Talking with hosts Budha and Sedky, Travis draws on his extensive experience to explore what a great developer experience can do for businesses, including what kind of value it generates. As he points out:
“We’ve been going down this route of thinking in terms of an API first mindset – starting to think of our APIs as products… APIs are our mechanism of how we’re going to grow because we believe APIs will allow us to scale in ways that we couldn’t before through third-party interactions built not by us internally but by others. That’s when we start to achieve that escape velocity style growth.
“APIs as a component that can affect our size and increase our rate of change, so the number of customers we can affect is far greater. Our addressable market – who we can impact with an API – and the capabilities that we have and the value we add is directly related to that.”
Make sure you don’t miss future episodes of All About APIs – subscribe via your favourite podcast platform and tune in every other Wednesday to listen to each episode as soon as we release it.
