While it may seem obvious that you should ask your API developers what they want, many times this is a simple task that can get lost in the shuffle of API deployment and management. API Evangelist is all about sharing, simple stories that keep API providers informed of the best practices of API management—today's story comes from big data platform Splunk.
Splunk is actively soliciting ideas from developers on where they think Splunk should take the platform, asking questions like, should we invest in SDKs for mobile devices like IOS and Android, and should we be adding a new kind of charting to the web framework? To solicit the feedback, Splunk isn’t getting fancy, they just deployed a feedback area using UserVoice—allowing developers to submit their own ideas, and vote up the ideas of other developers.
Splunk wrote up a blog post soliciting the feedback of the Splunk community, which is something that you should do on a regular basis, not just at launch of your feedback area. Any API provider should be actively engaging their community, which will not just provide valuable feedback for the roadmap, it will bring you out of your bubble, forcing you to be closer with your developer ecosystem—which I believe is one of the healthiest side effects of an API way of life.
