My previous posts have focused on developer experiences and APIs. These are a big theme in companies positioning themselves as “platforms as a service” i.e. be a pluggable value generating component within a more broader solution. This post focuses on building APIs and calls out 11 useful tips for building API centric platform products.
My last post on Developer Experiences introduced APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) & use cases they enable. Often referred to as the plumbing beneath the modern application development infrastructure, APIs are everywhere. Visa’s controversial $5.3B Plaid acquisition effort and the PSD2 mandate enforced in Europe were just the latest high profile examples that spotlighted this. In this post we dive deeper into an exciting revolution in the Fintech industry and understand the value driven by APIs.
Continue reading “Plaid and Visa, PSD2, and the API-first Economy”
The $7.5B Github acquisition by Microsoft last year placed lots of focus on the value of selling to developers in today’s technologically diverse ecosystem, and the investments companies are willing to make to cater to this community.
This wasn’t a surprising move and follows many such moves – IBM spending $34B on RedHat, Twilio acquiring Sendgrid for $2B, and even Salesforce acquiring Heroku for $250M as far back as 2011. If there is still skepticism, one only needs to follow the mind boggling growth patterns of businesses such as AWS, Stripe, and Atlassian that are building products with one primary theme – enabling developers to be more productive. So lets explore why the developer user base is so critical to companies today and how should organisations build products to address this?
Continue reading “DX: The Developer Experience Initiative every B2B company needs to build on”
