Introduction to Walking in the Customer’s Shoes

What will we learn?

The rising interest in API development brings up the need to think about the API-building process in a more methodical and strategic way. The first thing to do when we consider building any product is to identify the market opportunity and conduct user research to develop a deep understanding of our target customer. Customers and their experiences are the focus of an outside-in product development approach. This strategy is based on the idea that offering real value to customers is the only way to succeed.

Understanding our users begins with understanding their journey. Drawing a user journey map is a formal way of understanding how users arrive at a goal and the steps they take to get there. Developers are making more and more decisions about which technologies their organizations should use. As we build APIs that are mostly used by developers, it’s important to map out the path our developers take from the time they first find our APIs to the time they help them grow. Once we map out their journey, we can dive into and analyze each step to more deeply understand the points of engagement as well as points of friction. If we know a lot about the developer’s journey, we can find ways to make their overall experience better.

In this chapter, we'll learn about:

• Prioritizing user research.

• Establishing user personas.

• Mapping the developer’s journey.

• Determining customer touchpoints.

• Identifying points of friction and conversion.

By the end of the chapter, we'll have learned how to put customer needs at the center of our product strategy by developing a user research methodology that is useful for product prioritization and effective communication of customer needs across the development team and stakeholders.