The Producer and Consumer Life Cycle

Understanding the API development lifecycle

As a producer of an API, it is often easy to forget that a development cycle on the customer’s side is required to integrate with the APIs we produce. Unlike a mobile app or a website, the user experience of an API involves a developer or a team of developers being able to discover, evaluate, integrate, and scale their usage of the API. Depending on how easy or difficult our API is to use and whether we provide tools to minimize the effort needed, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few months.

Like every product, API products need a healthy flow of customer feedback to keep the customer’s experience as the top priority for product development so that the APIs can be improved over time and made better for customers. To achieve a continuous flow of feedback in API development, teams create customer feedback loops via support teams that enable the customer feedback and pain points to be recorded and reported back to the product development team for insights into the state of the APIs.

The following illustration shows the API producer on the left, representing a team that develops APIs. On the right, we see API consumers representing customers developing applications using these APIs.