As more business people become exposed to the API economy – the idea of turning business capabilities into APIs that are subsequently monetized in some way – they often race to the most obvious question: What should my strategy for the API economy be?
This question should come as no surprise given the widely documented successes of API high fliers like Google, Amazon, Twilio, and Stripe. But there’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest that the API economy strategy question is the wrong question to ask first because the knee-jerk response will not have been adequately informed by business requirements.
As just-in-time couriers of vital customer and business information and functionality, APIs should be viewed as enablers of business moments and end-to-end customer experiences that organizations didn’t dare contemplate only a few years ago. Today’s always-on, always connected, always-engaged technologies enable organizations to envision, fabricate, and iterate new, timely, customer, partner, and employee experiences that simply weren’t previously feasible.
And therein lies the right question: What would be an absolutely amazing customer experience or business moment? The ones that we didn’t think were possible before?
The answers should not be confined to native business capabilities and competencies. This is the time to take the customer view because the customer really doesn’t care what it is you do best. The customer doesn’t want to be an integrator. The customer would much rather you start thinking out of the box and imagine the experience from their point of view. Give them the ultimate, unexpected, and delightful experience and you’ll have a customer for life.
So, when we saw that ProgrammableWeb.com published a case study of how, at Intuit, customer experience is what determines API strategy, we thought it was a great opportunity to summarize the official step-by-step blueprint for letting business outcomes drive API strategies while also sharing the full text of the case study.
The author of the article, David Berlind, editor-in-chief of ProgrammableWeb will be discussing both the step-by-step blueprint and how Intuit aligned APIs to a broader business strategy in an upcoming webinar:
- Register for the webinar
- Read the case study on ProgrammableWeb
