Understanding What Growth Means for APIs
Learn to define growth for different API types—internal, partner, and public—by understanding their customer bases and discovery methods. Explore techniques to identify target audiences and calculate the total addressable market using top-down, bottom-up, and value theory approaches to inform your product strategy effectively.
APIs not only serve as a way for a company to offer a capability to external customers, but are also a big part of its internal infrastructure. Internal APIs allow teams to build infrastructure capabilities that other groups within an organization can use. Consequently, most APIs are made to be internal or for partner usage only and are not public-facing.
The definition of growth for an API product is deeply aligned with whether the APIs are for internal, private, or for public usage, as this will determine who the customer is and the tools they have available to discover and start using a given API.
Internal APIs
For internal APIs, the internal tooling makes APIs readily available to other teams. Usually, an API architecture or governance team establishs best practices for how APIs are built and published across an ...