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Developing a product? Flying solo? Are you serious!!

Collaborate and please don’t reinvent the wheel. About APIs and more….

You have an idea for a breakthrough product, maybe a website, or an app, a service, something? You have a clear idea about what you want to achieve and how you want to do it? Congratulations!

But what is the answer to this simple question:

Are you building everything from scratch?

If your answer is yes, it is time for you to get back to the drawing board and redesign your strategy. The best businesses around the world have exposed their expertise to developers as APIs. These APIs help you with every aspect of your product.

In case you want to know more about how APIs work, here is a brilliant article by Michael Bock.

Earlier, APIs lead to lock-ins to platforms, limiting your capabilities to some extent. But these shackles have been broken now. The new breed of API technologies offer capabilities that are independent of platforms and provide you the freedom to focus on your core offering.

Of course this may not be viable for all businesses due to limitations like privacy and security, the core business model, etc. But when you are not bounded by restrictions, here the reasons (in no particular order) why you should join hands with developers from all over the world to get the best out of your product.

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1. APIs reduce development time and cost

Think about the time and energy you will save when all you have to do is simply plug and play a certain technology. You don’t have to invest your time in learning about how to develop that particular technology, or to maintain and update it. Any modifications or updates to the APIs also don’t take too much of your core development time

2. APIs provide Best and latest technologies

Let’s be honest. Every organisation has a core offering that it is best at. What if your product has the best of all of them? Seriously! You may be able to build a supporting technology for your systems. But how frequently are you going to update the support systems? Are you really going to divert from your core offering, set up a different development team just for supporting systems? What if you don’t have to build these systems, can reduce the team size and still have the best in class technologies supporting your system; and these are always up to date? APIs let you plug in to the best and most suitable technologies of the world.

3. You can focus on your core offering

This is obvious. Focus on what your business really stands for — your core offering. Don’t bother too much about the rest. Of course, you still have to ensure you pick out the right technologies and APIs that integrate well with your core product.

4. Your product meets the world standards

APIs force you to think about how compatible your system/product is with the technology standards of the world. If it is a new product, you will start thinking about maintaining correct implementation and documentation standards. The customers who will use your products are generally used to a certain standard way of using technology. Ensuring you follow the standards leads to lesser customer frustration and shorter learning cycle; unless you plan to change how things work in general ;)

APIs cannot be dismissed as a fad that would pass or will be replaced by some technology soon. The API economy is on the rise and is here to stay. Most of the businesses are now offering two presentations of their product:

1. UI based
2. API based

Businesses allow the freedom to their customers use their products the way they want to. There is a standard UI that is offered that usually consists of dashboards, configurations and options to use the product in a standard way, limited by the UI. However, the APIs allow their customers to use their product in more number of ways that they can imagine.

Let’s take a look at TwilioHouse, who is taking the world by storm. The kind of technology they provide in telephony and communications has enabled so many businesses to improve their offering. Let’s consider how Uber (Uber Under the Hood) has used Twilio’s capabilities to provide excellent experience to their customers.

Uber’s mission is “give people what they want, when they want it”. They have developed the best technology to request and track services. They did not waste time in developing their own map technology. But, explored Google’s maps and used it in the best way possible. They used Twilio to provide seamless communication between the drivers and the riders. Had Uber tried and developed the maps and communication technologies, it would have wasted time and resources in developing and maintaining these as well. Instead, it now has the freedom to explore other opportunities that their core capabilities have to offer.

In conclusion, all I want to say is that your business requirements may be different; you may have constraints. APIs may not be the solution to all your problems. But they are the answer to many prayers. It is time to reconsider your development game.

P.S. And hey! who knows, after reading this post, you may even start to consider offering your core offering as an API.

Cheers!

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Check out my other story:

Product Housekeeping — Clean up that Feature Overload!