Publishing Your API Road Map Using Trello

I consider a road map for any API to be an essential building block, whether it is a public API or not. You should be in the business of planning the next steps for your API in an organized way, and you should be sharing that with your API consumers so that they can stay up to speed on what is right around the corner. If you want to really go the extra mile I recommend following what Tyk is up to, with their public road map using Trello.

With the API management platform Tyk, you don’t just see a listing of their API road map, you see all the work and conversation behind the road ma using the visual collaboration platform Trello. Using their road map you can see proposed features, which is great to see if something you want has already been suggested, and you can get at a list of what the next minor releases will contain. Plus using the menu bar you can get at a history of the changes the Tyk team has made to the platform, going back for the entire history of the Trello board.

Using Trello you can subscribe to, or vote up any of the message boards. If you want to submit something you need to sign-up and post something to the Tyk community. Then they’ll consider adding it to the proposed road map features. It is a pretty low cost, easy to make public, approach to delivering a road map. Sometimes this stuff doesn’t need a complex solution, just one that provides some transparency, and help your customers understand what is next. Tyk provides a nice way to provide a road map that any other API provider, or service provider can follow.

Another interesting approach to delivering an API road map that I can add to my research. I’m a big fan of having many different ways of delivering the essential building blocks of API operations, using a variety of simple free or paid SaaS tools. You’d be surprised at how useful an open road map can be for your API. Even if you aren’t adding too many new features, or have a huge number of people participating, it provides an easy reference showing what is next for an API. It also shows someone is home behind the scenes, and that an API is actually active, alive, and something you should be using.