Optimizing for Growth

Growth metrics help evaluate an API’s success and growth. These metrics can help identify areas of strength and areas for improvement in the API and can be used to set goals and track progress over time. Growth metrics focus on converting new and potential customers into existing customers. Sales and marketing teams are vital growth drivers at this part of the customer journey. The developer relations team also helps get more people to use our APIs because the content and community they build make it easier for developers to use them. Sales teams often work with larger customers where there are multiple decision-makers, and early customer targeting is managed through tools such as Salesforce, where sales teams track their efforts.

In this early phase of the customer journey, we have a few key indicators of growth that can help us measure our growth efforts. As we shape our APIs’ marketing and sales strategy, measuring product and infrastructure metrics is only part of the puzzle. We can measure the sales and marketing efforts in a way that allows us to calculate the targeting, response, and acquisition costs to ensure that the growth is in the desired direction. In this section, we will learn about metrics such as lead response, growth rate, quota alignment, and so on that help bring the sales and marketing teams into alignment with the product growth efforts.

The following illustration shows the key growth metrics that we'll learn about in this section.