Understanding What Growth Means for APIs

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 organization. Some tools, such as Postman, are utilized to share an API in the form of collections to help developers get started with APIs quickly. Postman allows a GUI-based interface where users can easily plug in their API credentials and get started. Tools such as Postman can often generate API reference documentation from API specifications to aid the adoption of APIs.

The potential for growth of internal APIs is limited by the size of an organization because that is the size of the user base that can potentially use this API.

An example of an internal API is an e-commerce company’s API for tracking shipments. This API can be helpful for building functionality, such as sending users shipment notifications as their order is shipped. This could be through emails or SMS alerts. Such functionality also needs to be surfaced to customer support teams so that support teams can answer questions about shipment delivery when customers reach out. If the team building the API doesn’t make it known that such functionality already exists, then other teams will build their own separate version, which results in duplication of work, a waste of engineering effort, and a loss in terms of delay. To avoid this scenario, internal processes are created to aid in the discovery and documentation of internal APIs.

Internal APIs, although used within an organization, must be treated like products in their own right and marketed effectively to raise awareness and adoption within the organization. As internal APIs get consumed widely within the organization, it shares the cost of development and operation, ultimately reducing redundancies.

Partner APIs

A partner API is a type of external-facing API ...